The Secret Agent is an astonishing book," said Ford Madox Ford. "It is one of the best--and certainly the most significant--detective stories ever written."        Set in late-nineteenth-century London, Joseph Conrad's intense political thriller anticipates the espionage novels of such writers as Graham Greene and John le Carré. It concerns a double agent who is charged with provoking the radical group he has infiltrated into an act of sabotage that will bring about its own destruction. In a marvelously drawn underworld of political and criminal intrigue, Conrad brilliantly explores the confused motives that lie at the heart of terrorism. Extraor-dinarily modern in the ironic view it takes of human affairs, this masterly tale of conspiracy builds to a climax that the critic F. R. Leavis called "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."        "The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling 'crime story' . . . apolitical novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human out-come," said Thomas Mann. And F. R. Leavis deemed it "one of Conrad's supreme masterpieces . . . one of the unquestioned classics of the first order that he added to the English novel." Read Less