History’s People

Historian Margaret MacMillan asks what difference individuals make to history through her own choice of historical figures, both well known and obscure, female and male. On leadership she turns to Bismarck uniting Germany, Mackenzie King holding Canada together and Franklin Delano Roosevelt bringing the United States into the Second World War, and she considers the huge, often destructive mistakes of Hitler, Stalin and Thatcher. Nixon and Samuel de Champlain appear as stubborn risk-takers, Fanny Parkes and Elizabeth Simcoe as adventurers who defied or ignored the limits of their societies, and Babur, the first Mughal emperor, and Victor Klemperer as observers whose diaries bring the past to life. Throughout, she weighs how biography and history connect.

Etisalat Nigeria chief executive Hakeem Belo-Osagie was named as a reader of it in a What CEOs are reading roundup.