Margaret Macmillan

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.

Climate change respects no borders.

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

There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.

Theodore Roosevelt's policy to build a two-ocean navy confirmed that the old-style isolationism of the founders had not survived the modern, increasingly globalized world.

If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.

Nominally left- and right-wing populists differ primarily in their choice of which 'others' to exclude and attack, with the former singling out big corporations and oligarchs, and the latter targeting ethnic or religious minorities.

If you start thinking war is inevitable, then in your own times, you don't resist it as strongly as you should.

I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.

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

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

The Great War was nobody's fault - or everybody's.

Living through times of rapid change can be exhilarating, but it also can be very difficult.

Women are interested in relationships and how other societies manage those relationships. They may have been constrained in what roles were open to them, but they could question and observe, and they could write it down.

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

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.

Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.