Cecil Rhodes was a mildly controversial figure in his own time, disdained by the same sorts of people as disdain self-made tycoons in our own age, and for the same sorts of reasons. But his political views were not especially outlandish by contemporary standards. He supported the Liberal Party, and strongly backed Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish autonomy, which he saw as a stepping stone to imperial federation. Like many Victorians, he believed that Britain’s global hegemony reflected the innate qualities of the British people. He would, I suspect, be surprised to see the Rhodes Scholarships, which he founded, being taken up today by non-white students from independent Commonwealth countries. But that, in a sense, is the whole point: Oxford, like the rest of the world, has moved on.