After a meeting with General Gordon of Khartoum in South Africa in 1881, Cecil John Rhodes set up a secret society, with the aim of establishing a new world order. The society, disciplined on Jesuit-style lines, became Rhodes's lifelong obsession, and after his death it lived on and grew under the leadership of his executor, Lord Alfred Milner. The society played a key role in the governance of Britain during the Great War and in the controversial...