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The Secret Agent & Nostromo

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The Secret It is 1886, and Verloc, an agent provocateur who is secretly working for the police and the Russian Embassy while ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho, is required by his masters to betray the anarchists in some spectacular way. The plan goes horribly wrong and the repercussions are dramatically different from those intended by Verloc.
The attempt to rescue the silver of the San Tome mine from the hands of yet another revolutionary dictator tests the characters of the Goulds, inheritors of the Latin American mine, and of the indispensable and trustworthy Nostromo himself. In the swirling world of Costaguana, as in the London of The Secret Agent, the psychology of individuals in the most extreme cirumstances reflects the fears and hopes of the time.

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1996

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About the author

Christopher Hampton

113 books24 followers
Christopher James Hampton CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, screen writer and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and also more recently for writing the nominated screenplay for the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.

Hampton became involved in the theatre while studying German and French at Oxford University where OUDS performed his play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality, reflecting his own experiences at Lancing College, the boarding school he had attended. The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and that production soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre, resulting in Hampton, in 1966, becoming the youngest writer to have a play performed in the West End in the modern era.

From 1968-70 he worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager. Hampton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1988 for the screen adaptation of his play Dangerous Liaisons. He was nominated again in 2007 for adapting Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. Hampton forthcoming project is the translation into English of Michael Kunze & Sylvester Levay's Austrian musical Rebecca based on Daphne du Maurier's book which is scheduled to premiere in 2009 in Canada, and then move to Broadway in 2010.

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