Amy Milne-Smith's book on gentlemen's clubs in late Victorian London is a useful addition to the literature on British elites. The governing class in Britain was not a narrowly aristocratic caste but a broader coalition of the well-educated and propertied, and it was in institutions like these clubs that aristocrats, leading professionals, and businessmen forged a sense of corporate identity as “gentlemen.” In this way, consciousness of class took on a particularly gendered form. In a series of thematic chapters Milne-Smith examines the efforts of club members to create a community of shared sensibility, starting with the processes by which clubs sought to exclude (“black ball”) those men whose status, character, manners, or politics did not pass scrutiny. Those accepted were “less defined by any formal sense of class than by a commonality of activities, lifestyle, and taste” (p. 37). Highlights of the book are the colorful accounts of the various transgressions of respectable masculinity that endangered club membership, ranging from Percy Douglas's public fistfight with his father to the member of the Savage Club who smuggled in his wife disguised as a man. Using bad language, treating servants poorly, drinking excessively, and incurring bad gambling debts were all deemed incompatible with gentlemanliness and merited disciplinary action. But the creation of a cohesive governing class rested on more than conforming to normative ideals, which leads Milne-Smith to an important argument. She claims that historians of men ought to be as sensitive to the importance of gossip as historians of women have been, because clubs were places where men shared rumors, stories, and jokes in a way that created and strengthened social networks. In order for these gossip networks to operate as mechanisms of social closure, however, their knowledge had to be kept secret, and so revealing to the public or the press what was heard in club conversation was considered a grave social offense. As a contribution to the history of privacy, this is timely.