Taking as his inspiration the historical accidental death by explosion of an anarchist outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, London in 1894, Conrad tells the dark tale of Adolf Verloc, an indolent, double-dealing secret agent of a foreign government pressured into committing an act of "shocking senselessness" against astronomy, of all things. As the novel bleakly, but with occasional streaks of humour, sifts the hidden motives of London anarchists and revolutionaries, police and government officials, and indeed of Verloc and his own immediate family, nearly all emerge, in their own way, as secret agents of a kind, not quite who they purport to be. (Summary by Peter Dann)