Dwarfish Charlie Boylan carries a loaded pistol into the House of Commons. He was a police spy for nearly forty years, and now he wants a pension and knows what 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" travels through the early years of the 19th century in a rumbustious, funny novel, worthy of the times it describes.