The Cliveden Set had its roots in South Africa immediately after the Boer War. Back in England its members formed a self-appointed pressure group. They would often meet at Cliveden or 4 St. James's Square in London - the homes of the American-born multi-millionaire Waldorf, 2nd Viscount Astor and his wife Nancy, by birth a Virginian belle, and the first woman M.P. to take her seat in the House of Commons. Suddenly in the late 1930s the Set was catapulted into unlooked-for notoriety when Communist journalist Claud Cockburn identified it as a cabal that sought to manipulate, and even determine, British foreign policy including a conspiracy to procure a humiliating, dishonourable settlement with Nazi Germany. "The Washington Post" asserted that the Set constituted "the real centre of British foreign policy," menacing and challenging "the constitutional structures of British democracy." This fascinating book is the first full-length account of the Set and its influence.
