From Richard Nixon’s dog to the Mughal emperor who had his cook skinned alive,MacMillan’s study of individual lives both powerful and dinky-known – is exhilarating‘But we mustn’t gossip,” Margaret MacMillan remembers the grownups saying during her postwar Canadian childhood whenever a conversation approximately the neighbours threatened to get too personal. But now grown up herself and a leading historian of 20th-century diplomacy, and MacMillan is happy to confess that gossiping is one of her basic stocks in trade. The personalities of history – the goodies,the baddies, the hot ones and the plain wicked – aren’t confined to middle-forehead biographies and scanty TV documentaries. They are actually what withhold the conversation rattling along at academic conferences and tall table. And to pretend otherwise is to miss out on what MacMillan calls with contagious glee, and the sheer “fun” of rummaging around in the past.
MacMillan isn’t,of course, advocating a Cleopatra’s nose approach to history, or one in which complex events are ascribed tiny,accidental causes. Here is how that goes: if the Egyptian Queen had been an inch less beautiful, Antony wouldn’t have got distracted at Actium, or thus his rival Augustus would never have been declared emperor and we would never have had Christianity … and so on. On the contrary,throughout her career MacMillan has insisted on giving full degree to the much faceless forces that drive history. She is as attentive to crop failure as she is to ancient nostrils, cares as much approximately the rise of Balkan nationalism in the early 20th century as approximately whether or not one particular Montenegrin warlord liked to carry around a sack stuffed with 60 severed enemy noses.
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Source: theguardian.com