The book:
Margaret MacMillan’s previous book, Peacemakers, told the story of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference through individuals, noble or scurrilous, and their vested interests. Focusing on telling history through individual stories, eschewing traditional historians’ macro view of history, her original, erudite and engaging writing earned Peacemakers the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Her brand new book, History’s People, as our choice this month.
History’s People continues her inquisitive and personable take on some of the biggest and most influential personalities of the past, examining how individuals shape history. We look at the effect of personality traits on history – such as the ‘hubris’ of Thatcher and Stalin, or ‘persuasion’ exhibited by Roosevelt and Bismark. However, MacMillan goes far further than telling the stories of leaders we all know. She also shows us history through the eyes of people normally ignored, such as Babur, the first Mughal emperor of India, or Victor Klemperer, an ordinary German Jew in the early days of Nazi rule. These elucidate history as much as the biographies and histories of the big names we already know. In doing so, MacMillan also fills in gaps about how we view the present, or history in the making. We hope you enjoy this month’s Shelf Improvement book.
What the Guardian thought:
Two of Otto von Bismarck’s house guests once stood in awe, writes Margaret MacMillan, contemplating his chamber pot. Like everything else about the man, it was outsize.
The anecdote nicely exemplifies MacMillan’s approach to greatness. She acknowledges its existence, but isn’t cowed by it. Her summary of Bismarck’s career, in this book, concedes that it was largely thanks to his tremendous will and his political adroitness that Germany was created, but it also shows him acting like a difficult child, slamming doors and announcing that his latest row with the kaiser had given him such a headache he was likely to die of it.
At the core of this book is the old question: are wars won, reforms enacted and power shifted by Great Men and Women? Or are history’s apparent movers and shakers actually puppets moved and shaken by vast impersonal forces – economic and otherwise? Upon the answer to this big question depends the answer to a smaller one: how should history be written? Biographically, or in the form of graphs and tables of statistics?
MacMillan, whose many gifts include common sense, begins by declaring: “There is no right or wrong answer.” Of course we are all to some extent the product of “the wider history unfolding around us”, but – equally certainly – had Napoleon Bonaparte never lived, European history would have developed differently. In November 1939 Adolf Hitler said: “I must in all modesty describe my own person: irreplaceable.” He may have been right – certainly his many would-be assassins hoped so. Individuals matter. And life stories are not only historically significant, they are entertaining to read – and where’s the harm in that? Often, writes MacMillan, there comes a point in a conversation when somebody says, “But we mustn’t gossip”. Academic historians have felt similarly uneasy, about biographical history. MacMillan defies them. “I want to gossip.”
Drawing on material she has already covered elsewhere (Nixon’s visit to China, the adventures in India of the wives and daughters of the Raj) and on the contents of her very well-stocked mind, she creates a collage of stories. MacMillan has an excellent dry wit, a broad range of reference – from Montaigne and Marx to Punch cartoons and hobbits – and a gift for storytelling. This form has form.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Read the full review
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