Book description
Dwarfish Charlie Boylan carries a loaded pistol into the House of
Commons. A can of worms waiting to be opened, he was a police spy for
nearly forty years. He wants a pension and what he knows will get it!
Did he, between Waterloo and Wellington's funeral, cause the Peterloo
riot to happen? Was it Charlie who fingered the Cato Street
Conspirators? Did Shelley really drown by accident? And at the opening
of the Great Exhibition was it he who saved the Queen from being blown
up? With dark undertones in its revelations of the orchestrated state
repression that followed the Napoleonic Wars, A Very English Agent
drives a horse, well, a donkey and cart, through the early years of the
nineteenth century in a rumbustious, funny, sexy, teeming novel, worthy
of the times it describes. Julian Rathbone was the author of many
highly-acclaimed novels. Two of which (KING FISHER LIVES and JOSEPH)
were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He died in February 2008.
