This book is a full-scale study of the world's most famous secret society, the Cambridge "Apostles." It shows how the Apostles recruited their members, examines their intellectual preoccupations, and studies the careers of such figures as F. D. Maurice, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes by tracing the participation of the Apostles in politics, letters, and liberal reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book also examines the role of liberalism, imagination, and friendship in modern life.