I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.

Margaret MacMillan

An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.

Margaret MacMillan

War Time Wrong

Hubris is interesting, because you get people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great things, and then something goes wrong - they just don't know when to stop.

Margaret MacMillan

Power Great You

History belongs to everyone. I don't think you have to give up scholarly standards. But I also don't think you want to write something that is impenetrable. You try as hard as you can to be readable.

Margaret MacMillan

History You Write

Many in the English-speaking world came to agree with the Germans that the Treaty of Versailles, and the reparations in particular, were unjust, and that Lloyd George had capitulated to the vengeful French.

Margaret MacMillan

Art World Wit

History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun.

Margaret MacMillan

History World UN

I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.

Margaret MacMillan

Art Yin Were

Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.

Margaret MacMillan

Art World Ways

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

Margaret MacMillan

Love History Worlds

As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.

Margaret MacMillan

War History Ways

Canadians see the Americans as cousins. We love the same sports: Canadians are crazy about baseball and basketball, and our beloved game of hockey is played all over the U.S.

Margaret MacMillan

Sports Love Us

How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890, he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France.

Margaret MacMillan

Well Via Us

History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.

Margaret MacMillan

History Great Yes

There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.

Margaret MacMillan

Women War Men

I still remember with gratitude a series for children on everyday life where we learned about the games children in other times had played and the food they ate.

Margaret MacMillan

Time Life Food

You shouldn't expect people in the past to do things they couldn't have done.

Margaret MacMillan

You Things Thing

The Great War was nobody's fault - or everybody's.

Margaret MacMillan

War Great Very

A lot of my father's family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.

Margaret MacMillan

War Family World War

Women are so much a part of war, even if they tend to see another side of it. To say they don't understand war is ridiculous.

Margaret MacMillan

Women War Men

The range of weapons at the disposal of military powers is terrifying in its capacity to damage the world and its inhabitants, perhaps even to bring humanity's long story to its end.

Margaret MacMillan

Power Age Yin

A large part of Canada heads for Florida, California, and Hawaii in the winter to get away from the snow.

Margaret MacMillan

Art Winter Win

In the 19th century, we didn't much like the loud annexationist voices south of the border or American support for Sinn Fein adventurers who thought, by seizing the Canadian colonies, they could force Britain out of Ireland.

Margaret MacMillan

It took a world war, between 1914 and 1918, to draw the United States into a deeper and more sustained relationship with the wider world.

Margaret MacMillan

Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.

Margaret MacMillan

I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.

Margaret MacMillan

War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.

Margaret MacMillan

Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.

Margaret MacMillan

Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, is a true populist; Senator Bernie Sanders, the former U.S. presidential candidate who campaigned for Hillary Clinton after losing his battle for the Democratic Party's nomination, is not.

Margaret MacMillan

If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.

Margaret MacMillan

We can prevent fighting by limiting weapons or finding nonviolent ways to end disputes.

Margaret MacMillan

The Italian futurists, the German expressionists, and the British vorticists were fascinated by speed and the ways the modern world was shattering conventions. The old ways of painting, writing, sculpting, and composing no longer seemed adequate to capture the world.

Margaret MacMillan

In my view, Germany could and should have made reparations for its aggression in World War I - but was the risk of renewed war worth forcing it to do so?

Margaret MacMillan

When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.

Margaret MacMillan

I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one.

Margaret MacMillan

The word 'populism' was everywhere in 2016. Political leaders claiming to speak for the people have achieved significant victories in Europe, Asia, and, with the election of Donald Trump, the United States.

Margaret MacMillan

Political orientation is unimportant in populism because it does not deal in evidence or detailed proposals for change but in the manipulation of feelings by charismatic leaders.

Margaret MacMillan

Nominally left- and right-wing populists differ primarily in their choice of which 'others' to exclude and attack, with the former singling out big corporations and oligarchs, and the latter targeting ethnic or religious minorities.

Margaret MacMillan

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

Margaret MacMillan

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

Margaret MacMillan

For many human beings, an interest in the past starts with themselves. That is, in part, a result of biology. Like other creatures, humans have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies their story.

Margaret MacMillan

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

Margaret MacMillan

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

Margaret MacMillan

Managing the relationship with a giant neighbour has been central to our foreign policy for more than a century. Trade and investment, as well as people, have flowed back and forth across the border, and the U.S. is, by far, our biggest trading partner.

Margaret MacMillan

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

Margaret MacMillan

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

Margaret MacMillan

American diplomats worked closely with the League of Nations. The United States used its considerable influence to settle some of the outstanding issues left over from World War I, and Washington took the lead in negotiating naval limitations in the Pacific.

Margaret MacMillan

The 1898 annexation of the Hawaiian Islands merely formally recognized what had long been American domination.

Margaret MacMillan

Theodore Roosevelt's policy to build a two-ocean navy confirmed that the old-style isolationism of the founders had not survived the modern, increasingly globalized world.

Margaret MacMillan

It is true that large parts of the world have not had to endure state-to-state wars for decades. The majority of the world's nations have also been spared the scourge of civil wars, although many have known violence from revolutionary insurrection.

Margaret MacMillan

Nuclear proliferation has never entirely been brought under control, and the arsenals of nuclear powers contain bombs far more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Margaret MacMillan

I did projects on Champlain coming up the St. Lawrence River and on Henry Hudson cast adrift in the bay that now bears his name. And I read dozens of historical novels: Rosemary Sutcliff on Roman Britain and G. A. Henty on British heroes, though my all-time favourite was Ronald Welch's 'Knight Crusader.'

Margaret MacMillan