“An explosion is the most lasting thing in the universe. It leaves disorder, remembrance, room to move, a clear space,” declares Conrad in one of his letters. At the turn of the twentieth century, when these words were written, explosions had a certain allure: their energy and potential for energising appealed to the human need for an instant change, a radical break with the past, a complete redefinition of reality. The new was to arrive with a cathartic big bang—a starting point for a transvaluation of all values that, according to the epoch's key philosopher, Nietzsche, could finally redeem the erring human race. History proved otherwise: blasts, detonations and other destructive outbursts quickly became modernity's gloomy emblems, though they were rarely followed by the positive developments they had initially promised. Conrad must have had a premonition of this when in 1907, while working on The Secret Agent, he made an explosion the main event of the plot and peopled his book with characters who carry inflammable ideas.