Quotes from Margaret MacMillan

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

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.

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

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.

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

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.

The trouble with the First World War, for example, is that people think war was inevitable, but I don't agree. If you look at the Cold War, you could argue that a war was bound to happen between the Soviet Union and its allies and the United States and its allies, but it didn't.

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.

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.

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

Individual lives remind us that there is something called a common humanity and that, over the centuries, there have been people who have lived and breathed and sometimes worried about very different things and sometimes worried about the same things we do.

The only person, if you're a religious person, who's always right is God. And if you make the mistake of thinking that you, like God, are always right, and that you, like God, always know everything, then it seems to me you're riding for a fall.

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

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

George W. Bush, judging by his repeated invocations, thinks that time will eventually prove that he was right. He is not alone in putting his faith in the future.

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.

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.

It's not going to be easy to create a world where both sides prefer peace, but we have to try.

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

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.

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.

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.

The cubism of Braque or Picasso, the dissonant compositions of Schoenberg or Stravinsky, the free-flowing and often erotic choreography of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky - these were acts of rebellion against the certainties and traditions of the old world.

As a Canadian, I've always approached international history as an outsider, neither attacking nor defending key decisions - those were made by actors who are also major figures within national historical traditions for American and British scholars.