'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.' Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'A Simple Tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.
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John Lyon has previously edited Conrad's Youth/Heart of Darkness/The End of the Tether for Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, and novels by Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and D. H. Lawrence.
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把生活理想化不管怎样都会使生活变得更为贫乏。美化生活,结果却使生活失去了它的复杂性——美化生活就等于破坏生活。
他们只是他在牌桌上认识的朋友。除了牌桌上见面以外,他从来没有在别的地方和他们聚会过。可是他们仿佛都以同病相怜的精神对待这种游戏,似乎它真是治疗生活不幸的良药;每天当太阳斜照着千家万户的时候,温厚而愉快、不耐烦的心情油然而生,这心情好比深厚的友情冲动,表明他很想跟牌友们在一起,借以解除为职业而辛苦的困乏处境。
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