Having been sent to southern Africa as a sickly 18-year-old in 1871, by the age of 30 Cecil Rhodes was the wealthiest man in the western world. Within a further ten years a country almost the size of Europe was named in his honour - Rhodesia. This biography presents Rhodes as a man consumed by ambition, blessed with charisma, tortured by love, and threatened at the pinnacle of his power by an influential female politician, Princess Catherine Radziwill. It is a story of diamonds and gold, of a lust for power that started wars and destroyed nations, of a priceless empire carved in the image of an extraordinary man.