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From the seed of an actual attempt, made in 1894, to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, Conrad created one of his most tense and chilling plots. The world of The Secret Agent - the world of law and order, fatuous civil servants and corrupt policeman - is grotesquely mirrored in its underworld, a squalid terrorist landscape inhabited by among others, the Professor, who always carries a bomb in his pocket, and Verloc the pornographer deceiver and spy. Repulsive characters and amoral caricatures collaborate to form a black satire on English society, a satire sharpened into focus with a portrait of 'family life': Winniw Verloc's story relentlessly told to its 'anarchic end of utter desolation, madness and despair'.
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