This chapter focuses on the imperial history of British ruling-class masculinities and codes of behaviours. Focusing initially on the Conservative writer and politician Rory Stewart, it proposes the category of the ‘imperial wonder boy’ – the archetype of the soldier-scholar-adventurer-administrator that runs through imperial culture from explorers and scholars such as Richard Burton through to their inheritors in Stewart and other figures of the post-2010 Conservative Party. Tracing the myth of the imperial wonder boy from his origins in the likes of Burton, and through the intimate collaboration between adventure fiction, memoirs that produced the adventure fiction of John Buchan, the writings of T.E. Lawrence and the lives and self-mythologisation of later figures such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, it argues that the rich imaginaries of this mythology still structure the public performance of the British ruling class and undergird its persistent appeal to an idea of innocence, exception and good intentions.