The Secret AgentPublished alongside other Conrad's works, on the 150th anniversary of his birth. In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894, masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating