Author(s): Julian Rathbone

Fiction

December 1852. Shortly after the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, Charlie Boylan attempts to enter the Palace of Westminster with a loaded pistol in his pocket. He is owed, so he says, a substantial sum by the government department he has worked for over many years - an adjunct of the Home Office that specialises in subterfuge and espionage. Imprisoned in Pentonville, Charlie writes his extraordinary memoirs to prove his claims. In A Very English Agent, Julian Rathbone combines his uncanny talent for wit and adventure with a compelling portrait of an England that history often neglects: the dark embers of the early nineteenth century when repression was bloody, commonplace and orchestrated from on high.