The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed original of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie at the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it sets the terms by which subsequent works in its genre were created. Conrad was the first novelist to discover the strange, in-between territory of the political exile, and his genius was such that we still have no truer map of that region’s moral terrain than his story of a terrorist plot and its tragic consequences for both guilty and innocent alike.