Dynamite, said a mysterious Victorian explosive-maker known as Professor Mezzeroff, was "the best way for oppressed peoples from all countries to get free from tyranny and oppression". Mezzeroff was the inspiration for the anarchist professor who carried a bomb on his body to evade arrest in Joseph Conrad's novel, "The Secret Agent". He was much beloved by Irish revolutionaries then conducting bombings across Britain, not least on London's underground railway. More than a century later, explosives are still being detonated there, this time by human bombs of the Islamist variety.
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