Margaret MacMillan

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:43

My castaway this week is the historian Professor Margaret MacMillan. She's known for her perceptive analysis of events and for her ability to assess the way they are shaped both by the historical forces of the time and by the individuals who participate in them.

Presenter0:59

As for her own history, it might have been a childhood spent in Canada hearing stories about family connections all over the British Empire that first kindled her interest in her chosen subject. It's equally possible that playing with a First World War hand grenade, a souvenir of her grandfather's, put her on the path to becoming a military historian.

Presenter1:17

She spent twenty five years as a teacher before she wrote her first book, and it was her second, published in two thousand one, that would be her breakthrough. Her account of the Paris Peace Conference in nineteen nineteen became a bestseller, and she became the first woman to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction.

Presenter1:35

Decorated many times over, both in the UK and Canada, in the past year alone, she's received the Simons Medal in recognition of her exceptional contribution to Canadian life and delivered the 2018 Wreath Lectures on Radio 4, exploring war's place in human culture. She says, history can help you make sense of your present situation, to remind you that there were other situations like it in the past, and to help you ask the right questions. It may help you, like a sign on the road that says dangerous curve ahead and makes you drive more carefully. Professor Margaret Macmillan, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you.

Margaret MacMillan2:11

Yeah.

Presenter2:12

So I mentioned your prize winning book, Peacemakers, about the Paris Peace Conference of nineteen nineteen. Now its success must have been all the more pleasing because surprisingly it was rejected, wasn't it, by a number of publishers?

Margaret MacMillan2:24

Quite a few. I have a file somewhere I found the other day and I was quite amused to read them. I mean, one said nobody wants to read about a bunch of dead white men sitting around a table talking about peace treaties. And another said, which was from quite a well to do university press, said we can't afford to publish a book that only a few people will buy.

Presenter2:41

So, why did they get it so wrong, do you think? And and what was it about the book that connected with people?

Margaret MacMillan2:46

I think why publishers perhaps got it wrong is it was at the end of the Cold War and everyone was looking ahead. And the Paris Peace Conference seemed so far in the past and why worry about it. But as the troubles began, after the Cold War ended, you know, we all thought there was going to be this lovely moment of peace, and then suddenly Yugoslavia fell to pieces. You got troubles in the Middle East, trouble in Afghanistan, and people began to ask, how did this all start? And why are these places having these conflicts? And you have to go back to understand them. To understand the Middle East conflicts, you have to go back. And so I think my book came at a time when people were beginning to ask those questions. And just to check, how many copies has it sold now?

Presenter3:11

Do I

Margaret MacMillan3:21

I've never done a final talk.

Presenter3:22

Well over her from him.

Margaret MacMillan3:24

Yeah.

Presenter3:24

Uh Uh So it worked out well in the end. And you were asked to rename your book for the American market because apparently books with the word Peace on the cover don't sell so well. Why is that?

Margaret MacMillan3:34

It came out in the UK in 2001, and it was coming out in the US in 2002. So that's after September the 11th. And the Americans were in an angry mood. And my editor in New York said, look, peacekeeping is not something they want to think about at the moment. And she said, also, Americans love Paris. And so they renamed it Paris 1919. And actually, I think it was a good move.

Presenter3:55

Tell us about your first piece today, why have you chosen it and what are we going to hear?

Margaret MacMillan3:58

Well, the first piece is a Welsh ballad, Mivanwi, and it's partly because my mother was Welsh. She had a wonderful voice and she adored Welsh music. And whenever a Welsh choir came to Toronto, where I grew up, we always went. And as children, we went sometimes to North Wales to see my grandmother, and there was always music then. And my father, who was Scots and who, of course, loved the bagpipes, did also love Welsh music, and this was his favourite Welsh song as well as one of my mother's. So it's one that has particular sort of memories for me.

Speaker 14:33

Find Victor

Speaker 24:51

All the way

Margaret MacMillan4:53

Hail the light cheery on

Margaret MacMillan5:21

Ding cron like carriage. Uh

Margaret MacMillan5:26

That's all for

Presenter5:30

Mavanwi, composed by Joseph Parry, with words by Richard Davies and performed by the Morriston Orpheus Choir.

Presenter5:37

A track that represents your connection to your Welsh family, Margaret MacMillan. And your book, Paris nineteen nineteen, did that too. You are the great granddaughter of David Lloyd George, the Liberal Prime Minister, who was at that Paris conference. What had you been told about him when you were growing up?

Presenter5:53

Yeah.

Margaret MacMillan5:53

I was told by my

Margaret MacMillan5:55

Grandmother and my great-aunt, who I was very fond of, and my various uncles and aunts and my mother's, you know, that he was a great political figure, and they took on all his sort of enmities. He'd had quarrels with the generals, they thought the generals were wrong, and so they were partisan, of course. And then I started studying history seriously, and I think I became a bit more detached, as one does. And I think I used to slightly annoy the elder generation by saying I don't think he was perfect in every way, which you do when you're young. And then when I started doing research for the Paris Peace Conference book, I approached it, I hope, I think, with a very objective and sceptical mind. But I did come around to thinking, yes, he had his faults, but he was a great negotiator. And he was someone who wanted to try and get the different sides together, which I think is a great talent in a statesman. So I developed an admiration for him, which I hadn't had before as I was doing the book.

Presenter6:45

You've written extensively about the First World War, and you've said that being Canadian has benefited you in that process. Why?

Margaret MacMillan6:53

Well, I come from a small country, not small geographically, but small in terms of power and population. And I never felt when I was writing about great events like the First World War that I had to defend my country or blame my country. I mean, I think it's more difficult if you're German or British or American because your countries were so important in these conflicts. And I think you're under more pressure to take a stand. And I felt being a Canadian, I could be somewhat detached and simply try and look at all sides. I don't know if I succeeded, but I think coming from a small power actually has a certain advantage.

Margaret MacMillan7:25

Uh

Presenter7:25

And your writing career took off after many years spent teaching. I wonder how your teaching experience has shaped you as a writer?

Margaret MacMillan7:32

I think it was hugely important. I taught at a polytechnic where none of the students were doing history as their main subject. They had to do liberal arts electives. And so they sometimes did it very reluctantly. They were doing engineering or business and they thought much more important to concentrate on their core subjects. And so I learnt. I think through that 25 years, and we did a lot of teaching, I learnt to tell stories. I learnt to get them interested. Not everybody, I couldn't, but I think I did learn to be a better teacher. And if you learn to tell a story, then it also helps your writing.

Presenter8:03

Let's go to the music. What's next?

Margaret MacMillan8:05

Well, this is is music that comes from the Second World War and was very much part of when I was growing up. I mean, I grew up just after the Second World War, and so it was still part of what we listen to. It's Duke Ellington.

Margaret MacMillan8:15

And it's Mood Indigo, which is so wonderful. And I've always had the greatest admiration for him. He was a wonderful musician. He was a great bandleader. He was so dignified. He dealt with American racism and he just kept this wonderful dignity. My parents were both medical students at the University of Toronto in the 1940s during the war. And they danced to this at the medical students' graduation with Duke Ellington's band. I know, and I think it meant a lot to them, and we heard it as children. And then one of my brothers graduated from an American university, Princeton, I guess the 1970s. And my parents went down to the graduation, and there was Duke Ellington's band. And so they danced again. It's lovely music, and I remember it very fondly.

Margaret MacMillan9:26

I don't know what's going on.

Margaret MacMillan9:28

We are

Presenter9:54

Duke Ellington and Mood Indigo, favourite of your parents, Margaret McMillan. So tell me a little bit more about your life growing up. You were born in Toronto and you're the eldest of five children, I think. How did you all get along?

Margaret MacMillan10:06

Not always well. I mean, we were a bit like, you know, Europe before the First World War, shifting alliances. So, you know, sometimes my sister and I would fight, and then sometimes my.

Presenter10:11

It's his

Margaret MacMillan10:15

sister and my eldest brother would fight and then sometimes the three of us would get on and we'd gang up against the youngest two. But I'm devoted to them all. I mean we over the years we became very good friends and we still see each other a lot and and I'm very lucky in that.

Presenter10:27

I have to ask you about the hand grenade that I mentioned in the introduction. It was a family heirloom of sorts, I think.

Margaret MacMillan10:32

Yeah, my Canadian grandfather was a doctor as well, and he'd gone with a group of Canadian doctors in the First World War to fight, initially with the British Army, because there was no Canadian Corps at that point. And he brought back souvenirs, including a hand grenade, and my grandmother used to keep it. In those days, people had things called curio cabinets, which are little sort of gold things, and you had little souvenirs from your trips or whatever. And the hand grenade was in it, and we'd take it out and roll it around the floor.

Speaker 110:49

Things new head.

Margaret MacMillan10:55

And at one point, I think when I was getting interested in military history, I said to them, you know, the pin is still in it. And there was a sort of consultation among the elders, and the hand grenade was removed, because I think it may have still been live.

Margaret MacMillan11:07

Where is it now? Do we know? Well, we don't, unfortunately. My father buried it up in the country. My parents had a farm outside Toronto and he buried it and we have no idea where he buried it, so we're just hoping no one puts a spade in.

Margaret MacMillan11:19

Situation.

Presenter11:19

So tell me more about your mother. What sort of person was she?

Margaret MacMillan11:22

She was a terrific mother and she died only about, I think, three years ago, and we all still miss her. She was very lively, she was very vivacious. She was unlike a lot of the other mothers in the neighborhood, and that you know, they were nice, but sh she was much more fun. And some of my friends still say you were so lucky. You know, she just was fun, and she encouraged us to read.

Margaret MacMillan11:41

And she encouraged us to play. And all the other houses in Toronto was very sedate in those days, and every house had a best front room. It was the best parlour, and you never went into it. I mean people covered the furniture with plastic and tablecloths and things. And our living room was a living room, and we could turn the furniture upside down and make forts, and we all sat there and read. And it was the only house in the street that was like that.

Presenter12:00

Time to go to the music. Tell me about your third disc today. Why have you chosen this one?

Margaret MacMillan12:03

One of the things I love is opera and and I love erdy.

Margaret MacMillan12:06

And this is that famous duet from the Traviata where the father of Violetta's lover comes to her and says, look, the Baron comes to her and says, look, for the sake of my son, you have to leave him and for the sake of our daughter who will never make a respectable marriage. And it is beautiful. And she does renounce her lover. And you can see that the Baron is beginning to understand who she is and what sort of woman she is. And it's just, I find it incredibly moving.

Margaret MacMillan12:37

What's happening?

Margaret MacMillan12:53

Here is all the waiting.

Speaker 213:07

Yeah.

Margaret MacMillan13:08

Uh

Margaret MacMillan13:10

Father

Speaker 213:13

Uh

Speaker 213:14

Yeah.

Presenter13:28

Ardite al Giovine, from Verdi's La Traviata, sung by Elena Kotrebach and Sheryl Milnes with the Bavarian State Orchestra, conducted by Carlos Kleiber.

Presenter13:40

Margaret Macmillan, your father, a doctor, was on board a naval ship during World War II when he got wind of your birth from a newspaper, I think. What happened?

Margaret MacMillan13:49

He was somewhere off Gibraltar. His ship was helping do convoys across the Atlantic. And he got a semaphore signal from another ship saying, Congratulations, your father. And he apparently signalled back saying, What sex? And the semaphore on the other ship said, don't know. And there'd just simply been an item in the newspapers that Lloyd George had had his first great grandchild. And so that was me. But my father didn't meet me until I was two years old.

Presenter14:09

Um

Presenter14:13

And did your father talk to you about his war experiences?

Margaret MacMillan14:16

He didn't talk much. He told us funny stories as children. He would tell us very funny stories about being in Gibraltar and all that, sort of walking along La Dinea into Spain. So he'd tell us funny stories, but only once. We were all together as a family and we were all quite grown up. And he just, for some reason, started telling us about the time his ship was nearly sunk.

Margaret MacMillan14:39

And he got quite sort of emotional and then we all got worried about him and didn't want him to be so you know, we sort of all patted him on the back. But it was the only time he talked about the sort of terrors of war.

Presenter14:47

No.

Margaret MacMillan14:47

Um and I I do remember it very vividly.

Presenter14:50

Your parents sound like extremely can-do people. I wonder how much of their sense of adventure rubbed off on you and your siblings?

Margaret MacMillan14:58

The great pattern in Toronto and most Canadian cities was to have a summer cottage. Then you'd go north and you'd spend the whole summer at the cottage. And my father hated it. He just hated cottages. He thought they were boring. He said there was nothing to do. And so he and my parents just put us in a car, five of us. I don't know how they stood it. We drove. We drove to the west coast, we drove to the east coast, we went hiking, we went on canoe trips. You know, canoe trips are quite strenuous. We went on canoe trips for two weeks where you had to carry everything over portages and paddle. But none of us have ever bought a summer cottage or wanted one. You're going to be fine on this island, I think, Margaret. Well, I hope so. I wasn't ever very good at the campfire stuff, so I'm going to have to brush up, I think. Time for some more music. It's your fourth disc. Well, it's Canadian. That's why I've chosen it. We haven't had a very violent history in Canada, but we had two rebellions in the 1830s and 1837. And a number of the people who led those rebellions were sent into exile, both English and French speakers. And this is a song in French about some of those exiles sung by an English Canadian folk singer, which I think shows something, I hope, about the way our two cultures meld. But it says something to me about all those Canadians who are either forced to leave or do leave. And you always miss Canada, and you miss the space, and you miss the country. And every time I hear it, I think about Canada.

Presenter16:08

Ganadienne Ro Uh

Margaret MacMillan16:13

Uh

Speaker 216:14

Yeah.

Margaret MacMillan16:14

Uh

Presenter16:15

Bani the Savior Yay

Presenter16:22

A Canadian

Margaret MacMillan16:28

Bane the safe voyage.

Margaret MacMillan16:35

Uh

Presenter16:35

Recourait employees.

Presenter16:41

Bonnie Dobson, une Canadienne Eron.

Presenter16:44

Margaret MacMillan, you began studying history at the University of Toronto in nineteen sixty two. Had the sixties started to swing at that point? Were they swinging for you?

Margaret MacMillan16:54

No, not really. When I went to the University of Toronto, it was very proper. I mean, we didn't wear trousers. We wore skirts. We wore little cardigans. Men wore ties. It was extraordinary. But it happened when I was at university. You began to hear about this, you know, something called marijuana, which people were talking about. It all sort of began to happen. And music. And it was a time of considerable turmoil. I mean, in Canada, we were a much more karma society, but even there, we were affected by what was going on in the US. And the American Consulate was conveniently very close to the University of Toronto, so between lectures, we'd go down and demonstrate for civil rights.

Presenter17:27

Your PhD thesis was titled The Social and Political Attitudes of the British in India. Why did you choose that?

Margaret MacMillan17:35

Subject. I suppose growing up in Canada, you cannot but be interested in the British Empire because we were part of it. And when we were growing up, our passports were British passports. Everywhere you had the pictures of the monarch. And I became very interested in the gradual change of the British Empire into the British Commonwealth and the independence of the different countries. And India also, because my maternal grandfather was a doctor in India.

Margaret MacMillan17:59

and we had as children a tiger skin that he I'm sorry to say he had shot a tiger, but anyway in those days it was okay. And we used to play with the tiger skin. And my mother had been born there, so maybe I I I sort of learnt something through that, and it gave me a year in India, which was fabulous.

Presenter18:14

Yes, researching your thesis in in the pre-Internet era. What did that involve?

Margaret MacMillan18:19

In a way, I think we were lucky, although it was much more difficult. I mean, there was no photocopying in those days. You had to go and look at the documents and take notes by hand, and you had to go to wherever they were. And nowadays, I notice with my graduate students is that they will often go somewhere for a week and take lots of photos and then come home. But I'm not sure you get the sense of a place in the same way as if you have to live there. And what made a difference to me, I was writing about the British in India, and before I went, I thought, you know, they were pretty awful, and the women were pretty awful, and they were so intolerant, and they really didn't like living in India, and they complained about it. And then when I was there, I thought, you know, I can understand how homesick you get. You're a minority in a very, very different culture, very alien culture. And I remember one night being incredibly homesick, and I think I had something called dengue fever, which didn't help. And I thought, I just want to be home.

Margaret MacMillan19:06

eating the food I know with people I know and and I was listening to my radio. I had a little short wave radio and suddenly I heard this Mozart horn concerto on my little radio. Made me feel incredibly homesick.

Presenter20:16

Part of the rondo from Mozart's Horn Concerto No. two in E flat major, performed by Dennis Brain and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karrian.

Presenter20:27

Margaret MacMillan, how do you feel about the task that awaits the historians of the future, the people who'll be combing through the mass of digital information to make sense of our own age and look for insights?

Margaret MacMillan20:37

I don't know what they're going to do because there's going to be too much, I think, and too little. I mean, there's going to be endless amounts of email and Twitter, assuming it survives. And I think a lot of governments are now storing it, so maybe it will survive. But I think what's happening, and it's partly WikiLeaks, I think, and the other sort of big spills of data, that people are getting very cautious about what they say. And so governments and government officials aren't putting down on paper or in electronic form what they really think. And that, I think, is going to be a real problem, because what we do when we look at the past, particularly the sort of 19th century, is we can read things that people wrote. And they wrote them knowing that nobody else was going to see what they wrote except for about three other people. So they're very frank. And I think it's going to be difficult. So that shareability has shifted things. I think so. I even wonder if people are keeping diaries as much anymore.

Presenter21:25

Do you still enjoy seeing research materials and actually being in contact with something that puts you in touching distance of the past?

Margaret MacMillan21:32

Absolutely. I mean, I I remember the first time I was reading something before the First World War and there were sort of comments scribbled on the side and then the initials WC and I thought who's W. And I thought Winston Churchill, you know, and you thought he just scribbled something hastily on this, and that is exciting.

Presenter21:48

What we read it

Margaret MacMillan21:49

It was documents something to do with naval strategy, I think, because he was very much engaged in that, because he was the first Lord of the Admiralty. But even physical objects, seeing something that someone once held. I remember an exhibition once that had Peter the Great's boots, and they were huge. You know, you just thought, who was this man?

Presenter22:06

We're going to go to the music now. It's your sixth disc today. Why have you chosen this one?

Margaret MacMillan22:11

Bob Dylan, Blowing in the Wind. Well, again, that's part of my youth. And perhaps you remember these things from when you're younger very vividly. And it was the 60s. And Vietnam was something that was a big cause. A lot of Canadians opposed it. We had our own demonstrations, being very Canadian, quite polite demonstrations on the whole. And this was a song that just wove its way, as a lot of Bob Dylan's music did through the 60s. And it seemed to it, wasn't just about Vietnam, it was about the turmoil, the upheaval, the civil rights movements, the whole sort of challenge to what had been an accepted structure.

Margaret MacMillan22:44

How many seas must the white dove sail?

Margaret MacMillan22:49

Before she sleeps in the sand

Margaret MacMillan22:54

Guessing how many times must the cannon balls fly?

Margaret MacMillan22:59

The four there forever banded

Margaret MacMillan23:05

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Margaret MacMillan23:10

The answer is a blowin' in the wind

Margaret MacMillan23:14

This is so wonderful.

Presenter23:16

Bob Dylan and Blowing in the Wind. Margaret MacMillan, in your recent book History's People, you look at leadership and you discuss in detail Joseph Stalin, Margaret Thatcher, Adolph Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. How often does what you find out about a person during the research process surprise you and how often do you change your opinion of someone?

Margaret MacMillan23:37

I think I'm often surprised. You find out things about people's private tastes, about what they're really interested in. Woodrow Wilson, for example, I found out, told terrible jokes. And that sort of gave me a different view of him. You know, someone with a tin ear for jokes, it says something, I think. Or you find out that Sir Edward Gray, the British Foreign Secretary before the First World War, had a passion for birdwatching.

Margaret MacMillan23:59

And I think the only book he wrote was about birdwatchering, and that gives you a dimension. I I can't you know, I can't say that it makes you think about them totally differently. I mean, Hitler was a vegetarian and nice to dogs, it didn't change my view of him.

Presenter24:12

And how possible is it to look beyond the public face that a person presents, particularly an iconic world leader, and find a real person? And how important is it to do that?

Margaret MacMillan24:23

Well, I think it is very important. I think we're all at base driven by our emotions and our passions and our fears and our wants. And of course, we have intellectual ideas as well, and we think things through because we're rational beings. But I think we are a bundle. And I think great leaders are just as much a bundle of emotions and ideas and everything else as the rest of us. You can almost revere them too much and see them as sort of plaster saints or plaster monsters or see them as not really being fully human. And of course they are. And they're driven by the same sorts of things as the rest of us, perhaps on a bigger scale.

Margaret MacMillan24:56

And you've described

Presenter24:56

described history as more a branch of literature than of science, but it often has very real world effects. Can history books influence leaders to change their policy decisions, for example?

Presenter25:07

Yeah.

Margaret MacMillan25:07

They can, I think. The trouble is, of course, if leaders read selectively. I mean, Bill Clinton, apparently, read a book about Yugoslavia in the Balkans when the whole place was blowing apart, which argued that the Balkans have always been trouble, they've always been like that, they've always fought each other. And I think that helped to persuade him not to get involved, which I don't think was necessarily a good thing. Kennedy had read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was very conscious, and I'm glad he was, that you can sometimes blunder into catastrophic situations without meaning to.

Presenter25:41

And having studied the personalities of past leaders and the way that their individual character traits changed and shaped the course of history, what do you make of the current crop of world leaders?

Margaret MacMillan25:52

It is interesting, isn't it? I mean, I don't want to be too pessimistic, but it seems to me they're in a rather difficult time where there are very few.

Margaret MacMillan25:59

World leaders who inspire, at least in me, much confidence. You know, Trump is clearly.

Margaret MacMillan26:06

Totally incompetent, I think way beyond his depth. I mean, he wasn't a great real estate developer in New York, and he doesn't have any of the qualities, in my view, that you need for president. I think we have also seen, I would say, a failure of political leadership in a number of countries. Perhaps I don't want to be rude about Britain, but the sort of drift in the past few years strikes me as something very, very unfortunate. And we've seen a rise of authoritarian leaders who aren't necessarily great leaders, but who have a particular way of running and manipulating their country. So individual leaders don't make the difference for everything, and the times matter, and the economic forces matter, and all that matters. But I do think individuals can, for better or worse, push history in one direction or another.

Presenter26:48

You said you don't want to be pessimistic. Where are the bright spots?

Presenter26:51

Well

Margaret MacMillan26:52

Oh Canada.

Presenter26:52

Uh

Margaret MacMillan26:52

No, I sh I'm I'm patriotic, but no, I mean, I think those one on press ups are pretty, pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. But no, I mean, I think there are bright spots, and I think democracy is strongly rooted in in ways that it wasn't perhaps in the nineteen thirties in some countries. I mean, who would have thought

Presenter26:57

Prissy.

Margaret MacMillan27:08

You know, in the 1930s who would have thought that Germany would become the great bulwark of democracy and a liberal international order?

Presenter27:14

Time for some more music. What are we going to hear next?

Margaret MacMillan27:17

Well, this is from a composer I came to late in life, Wagner. I didn't get Wagner when I was younger. I found it heavy. I don't know what I thought of it, but perhaps I was influenced by Wagner's own appalling views on many things, including his anti-Semitism. But as I began to listen to Wagner, and I began to listen to the ones that are perhaps more accessible, like The Flying Dutchman and The Meistersinger, I began to get it, I think. And I finally went to a ring cycle, and I found I did it sort of in a week, and I found the music just kept going on and on through my head. And so now I'm not a Wagner fanatic, but I'm much closer to that end of the spectrum than I was. And so this is the overture from the Meistersinger, which is one of the first Wagner operas I really came to love.

Presenter29:00

The overture from Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurenberg, performed by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Maris Janssens. Margaret Macmillan, we've talked a bit about the past. I would like to ask you about the present as well. Some commentators believe that institutions like the UN and the EU, which were set up to maintain peace, seem quite vulnerable in today's climate. And you started your Wreath Lecture series with the ominous phrase, we have a lot to be pessimistic about. How worried are you about where we are now and what comes next?

Margaret MacMillan29:31

Well, I don't want to be worried and and I think pessimism is something you slip into too easily and I certainly don't want to be cynical about what's happening.

Margaret MacMillan29:38

But I am more concerned than I would have been, say,

Margaret MacMillan29:41

Five years ago, ten years ago. I think it's partly because we are tending to forget with the passage of time, it's inevitable, why we wanted a United Nations, why we wanted the things like the World Bank, the Bretton Woods organizations, the World Bank, the IMF, World Trade Organization, why the European Union seemed like a good idea to European countries who'd been at war with each other so much. And I think we forget that these institutions came at a time when the world was shattered in a very bad way and have proved. Of course they have faults and I'm not defending everything they do or have done, but they came at a time when people wanted something that would guarantee stability and peace, which is not such a bad thing to want. And I think we're now contemptuous of them. We don't understand their purpose. And I think we have the United States, which is becoming increasingly isolationist, at least under the present president. And if the United States is not engaged, then it's really bad for all of us. And so I am worried. And I'm worried about the growth of illiberalism. I'm worried about the growing hostility in so many countries to immigrants, this fear of others. I mean, I think these are not good signs.

Presenter30:45

You've also written that we've lost a sense of common ground. What do you mean by that?

Margaret MacMillan30:49

Well, the way in which politics has become polarized in certain countries is that the people simply won't speak to each other. The more I go to the US these days, Republicans and Democrats are just not speaking. And quite often they're living in different suburbs or different bits of the cities or different parts of the country. And that's worrying because, you know, we do have common ground. We have to work together. You know, of course we can disagree. But at a certain level, we want to make sure that our society works.

Margaret MacMillan31:15

Let's go to the music.

Presenter31:15

It's your eighth disc today. Tell me about this one.

Margaret MacMillan31:19

Well, it's from The Rosen Cavalier, which is another of my favorite operas, but it's from the last act when the Marshalline recognizes that Octavian is in love with a much younger woman and she's recognizing her age. And so it's about aging.

Margaret MacMillan31:33

And since I'm now seventy five, aging is something I'm I think about not all the time, but I'm aware of. And it's a very moving piece, I think. And it's it's sort of when the Rose and Cavalier stops being a comic opera and it becomes something rather sadder. Anyway, it's elegiac and it is, I think, a wonderful piece of music.

Presenter33:02

The trio from Act Three of De Rosen Cavalier, with Sophie Koch, Rennie Fleming, and Diana Damarau. They were accompanied by the Munich Philharmonic, conducted by Christian Tielemann.

Presenter33:14

It's time to cast you away to our desert island, Margaret MacMillan. What do you think would present the biggest challenge to your survival while you're there?

Margaret MacMillan33:22

I'm not actually that good at building things. And so I think, you know, I hope it's going to be a warm tropical island because the idea that I can be in Swiss Family Robinson and build a nice little commodious chalet, I don't think so.

Margaret MacMillan33:33

How are you at Sol?

Presenter33:33

Solitude in your own company.

Margaret MacMillan33:36

Not bad actually. I think I spend a lot of time on my own and writers do. I think after a few days if I've been writing and I haven't talked to people, I think I'm getting a bit rusty at human interactions. I better get out and meet someone. But um yeah, not too bad.

Presenter33:47

Okay.

Presenter33:47

I'm sending you away with the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible. You can also choose a book of your own to take with you. What are you going to go for?

Margaret MacMillan33:55

What I'd like to go for, but it may be slightly cheating, is Proust, à la la Rochesse du Temp Perdieu. And I would like to take it in French, because my French is rusty, and it would force me to read in French, and it would keep me going for quite a while.

Presenter34:09

You may have it, it's yours. You can also have a luxury to make life more comfortable. What would yours be?

Margaret MacMillan34:15

Well, my luxury, I don't know if it exists in technology, but what I would like is something, possibly a device that will teach me to sing.

Margaret MacMillan34:22

so that I can practice singing. It'll be good on a desert island'cause no one can hear me.

Margaret MacMillan34:27

Now, buy a device to help you practice singing. Have you got any idea what that might be? What do you think? No, well, I'm thinking of something because I'm not allowed another book. Otherwise, I could take singing for dummies. But if there was something that would play a few notes and then I would sing back to the thing and it would play it back to me, I couldn't do anything else with it. It would just be for learning to sing.

Presenter34:35

Pacific.

Margaret MacMillan34:47

Well, we'll have to invent that. But Margaret, if we can, we'll rustle one up and give it to you. Oh, please, please. And I thought I could sit there and sing and not bother anyone, but maybe eventually the dolphins will come and and sing to me too.

Presenter34:51

Well, please.

Presenter35:00

And finally, one last choice, which of the eight discs that you've chosen today would you decide to save?

Margaret MacMillan35:06

I think I might take Mood Indigo, because it was played all over the war in the Pacific in the Second World War, and I'd be on an island somewhere, and it might remind me of all those other people who came through.

Presenter35:17

Professor Margaret McMillan, thank you very much for sharing your desert island discs with us.

Margaret MacMillan35:24

Yeah.

Presenter35:24

Uh

Presenter35:38

As we leave Margaret Honor Island reading Proust, there's just time for me to remind you that there are many historians in our back catalogue, including Sir Simon Sharma, Lady Antonia Fraser and John Julius Norwich. In 1995, Sue Lawley spoke to Eric Hobsborn, who recounted his childhood upbringing in Berlin during the early 1930s. After the death of both parents, he and his sister went to live with their aunt and uncle.

Speaker 236:04

We were taken over by an aunt and an uncle. It so happened my father's brother had married my mother's sister, so there was a closer relationship between

Speaker 236:13

uh these uh uncles and aunts and uh they more or less took us over and um

Speaker 236:19

went on educating us and looking after us.

Margaret MacMillan36:22

And this was in Berlin.

Speaker 236:23

This was in Berlin.

Margaret MacMillan36:24

which of course was a historic time, early thirties.

Speaker 236:27

It was an extraordinary period, absolutely extraordinary. I mean, this these few years are in many ways the absolute

Speaker 236:36

crucial period in at least in my life. It was living through what we knew to be

Speaker 236:42

An extraordinary

Speaker 236:44

dramatic turning point in history.

Margaret MacMillan36:46

You knew then, even then.

Speaker 236:48

Yes, we knew what the stakes were.

Speaker 236:51

I remember the afternoon when Hitler came to power, you know, seeing the headline as myself and my sister were walking back from school.

Speaker 237:01

I was already politically

Speaker 237:03

organized in some kind of schoolboys' association.

Speaker 237:07

Communist type.

Margaret MacMillan37:09

Can you remember your reaction in that moment when you saw that headline?

Speaker 237:13

The reaction was, what if anything could be done?

Speaker 237:18

meetings, distributing leaflets, all the rest of it, didn't do much good.

Margaret MacMillan37:22

And what do you remember of those months after Hitler came to power in january thirty three? How did things change?

Speaker 237:29

As far as I myself was concerned, obviously they didn't change. We weren't affected by it. We were we were English. We were not German. Consequently the worst that could conceivably have happened is being expelled.

Speaker 237:40

But as far as other people are concerned, we knew that in some ways this was the end and the terrible

Speaker 237:47

Dangerous period had begun.

Speaker 237:49

Otherwise it so happened

Speaker 237:52

that my family left a few months after that, not for political reasons, because uh my old man's job folded in the Depression, and uh went back to England to try and reconstruct his life there.

Margaret MacMillan38:05

That was the summer of'thirty three' and you would have been sixteen.

Speaker 238:08

Not quite sixteen, yes.

Presenter38:11

The historian Eric Hobsbaughn, and you can hear his edition and download many more programmes via the Desert Island Discs website. Join me next week when my guest will be the hairdresser Trevor Sobey.

Speaker 138:34

Did you know that technology can make us kinder to one another? Did you hear about the diver who walked out of the sea onto a Portuguese beach, dragging the Internet behind him?

Speaker 138:46

Did you realize that how you speak to the little robot helper in your house might cement age-old stereotypes for decades to come? I'm Alex Kurtowski, and those are just some of the stories that we've looked at in The Digital Human, the podcast that explores what it means to be human in the digital age. If you want to hear more, and I guarantee we will surprise you, come check us out exclusively on BBC Sounds.