With an Introduction by Graham Stewart, author of the internationally acclaimed Burying Caesar and The History of The Times, The Murdoch Years. Joseph Conrad was a remarkable and unique phenomenon in British literature. Born in Poland in 1857, he worked as a merchant seaman before turning his hand to writing novels in English. Heart of Darkness, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now!, Nostromo (adopted as the name of the spacecraft in the film Alien), Lord Jim and above all The Secret Agent, converted to a film by Alfred Hitchcock, penetrate to the heart of evil and the evil in the human heart. The Secret Agent (1907) is a shattering exposé of the callous cast of mind behind the wave of terrorist attacks which swept Europe and America between 1892 and 1901. Its lessons are of extraordinary relevance to the al Qaeda outrages which began with 9/11 in New York and continue now in Madrid and London. As Graham Stewart, The Times historian, who provides a new introduction to this volume, points out - The Secret Agent had its germ in an actual attempt made in 1894 to blow up the Greenwich Observatory.
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The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the best and certainly the most significant detective stories ever written. Ford Madox Ford
The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling crime story . . . a political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human outcome. Thomas Mann
One of Conrad s supreme masterpieces. F. R. Leavis
[The Secret Agent] was in effect the world s first political thriller spies, conspirators, wily policemen, murders, bombings . . . Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties his overweight wife and problem child, his lack of money, his inactivity, his discomfort in London, his uneasiness in English society, his sense of exile, of being an alien . . . The novel has the perverse logic and derangement of a dream.
from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by Paul Theroux"
Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857 and grew up under Tsarist autocracy. In 1874 Conrad travelled to Marseilles, where he served in French merchant vessels before joining a British ship in 1878 as an apprentice. In 1886 he obtained British nationality. Eight years later he left the sea to devote himself to writing, publishing his first novel, Almayer's Folly, in 1895. The following year he settled in Kent, where he produced within fifteen years such modern classics as Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. He continued to write until his death in 1924.
J. H. Stape is the author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (1996) and Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters (2004).
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