Recommendations from our site
“The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad may be one of the first espionage thrillers…It’s about anarchists in London at the turn of the century. The character at the heart of the book is instructed by his handler—a sinister foreign agent based in Britain, we don’t really know who they are—to go and plant a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory, an important landmark in London to this day. And without giving too much away, it all goes wrong. It’s tragic but it’s got a dark humor, which people who are fans of Joseph Conrad will be familiar with.” Read more...
“Basically, anything you want to know about how terrorism works you can find in this book. It is not necessarily about who is behind terrorism because in this book it is a shadowy foreign state that wants an agent provocateur in London to explode Greenwich Observatory to make a point.” Read more...
The best books on Islamic Militancy
Jason Burke, Foreign Correspondent
“There are lots of reasons I’m very fond of Conrad as a writer. I like visions of London that come translated or diffused or refracted through other cultures…In The Secret Agent, you go from a shop in Soho into a space like Greenwich Park, where the bomb incident takes place – quite an interesting journey in itself – and then, at the end, there’s an extraordinary marching-away into the suburbs of one of the characters who walks through endless anonymous, curious areas. So it’s another navigation of London, but this time it’s the London of conspiracy and paranoia, the London of imported terror groups or anarchist groups who come from other places but enact their dramas here.” Read more...
Iain Sinclair, Novelist
“The book is based on an incident that actually did occur when an anarchist tried to blow up the Royal Observatory. In the novel, a group of hapless anarchists are trying to incite a rebellion. Their main concern is that British society is too liberal and they want to demonstrate that this kind of thing can occur. What I loved about this book is the cynicism that Conrad has in looking at the zealot. He makes clear that a person may start out as a true believer but over time they are doing work that they may or may not believe it. It is the silliness of zealotry that becomes really clear.” Read more...
The best books on Who Terrorists Are
Jessica Stern, Political Scientist
