Overview

What difference do individuals make to history? Are we all swept up in the great forces like industrialisation or globalisation, or is the world we inhabit shaped just as much by real people - leaders for example - and the decisions that they make? For better or for worse, the personalities of the powerful can affect millions of people and the future of countries: it matters who is in the driving seat, and who is making plans. Equally important: how is history itself made by those who keep the records? In History's People Margaret Macmillan explores the lives of the great and lesser-known figures of the past: men, women, explorers, rulers, dreamers, politicians, observers, campaigners. She looks at the concept of leadership, from Bismarck to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but also at the role of observers such as Babur, first Mughal emperor of India, and asks how explorers and visionaries such as Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe managed to defy or ignore the constraints of their own societies. And, in doing so, she uncovers the important and complex relationship between biography and history, and between individuals and their times. Like all the best history, this book will change the way you see the past, as well as your own times - and perhaps introduce you to some people you didn't know.

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9781781255131

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Reviews

Irreverent and highly enjoyable * Observer * Combines erudition and enthusiasm * Independent * As entertaining and illuminating a work of popular history as one could possibly wish for * Prospect * She yet again shows that she is not only a consummate storyteller; she is also a brilliant historian * New Statesman * A wise and necessary book * The Times * Her enthusiasm ... really shines through. * Financial Times * Exhilarating * Guardian *

Irreverent and highly enjoyable Observer Combines erudition and enthusiasm Independent As entertaining and illuminating a work of popular history as one could possibly wish for Prospect She yet again shows that she is not only a consummate storyteller; she is also a brilliant historian New Statesman A wise and necessary book The Times Her enthusiasm ... really shines through. Financial Times Exhilarating Guardian

Author Information

Margaret MacMillan is the renowned author of the international bestsellers The War That Ended Peace, Nixon in China and Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize and the 2003 Governor General's Literary Award in Canada. The past provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, she is now the warden of St. Antony's College at Oxford University.

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