Margaret MacMillan

Margaret MacMillan is warden of St Antony’s College and professor of international history at Oxford.

A Bit of Chaos: The Great War and After

Margaret MacMillan, 5 February 2015

A common​ and still widely accepted story of the origin of the Second World War is that it was the direct result of what happened in 1919 at the end of the Great War. The French were recklessly vengeful towards the defeated, the British callously indifferent to what was happening on the Continent, and the Americans smugly isolationist. The Allies made Germany sign a humiliating treaty...

Von Hötzendorff’s Desire: The First World War

Margaret MacMillan, 2 December 2004

The Great War seems far off, the world before 1914 even further. We find it hard to believe that men and women cheered in the streets as Europe lurched towards war that July, that the men who poured onto the battlefields in their millions talked the language of duty, and that Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians travelled across the world to help the ‘mother country’. Perhaps...

The First Calamity: July, 1914

Christopher Clark, 29 August 2013

The European continent was at peace on the morning of Sunday, 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne, and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo...

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Omnipresent Eye: The Nixon/Mao Show

Patrick Wright, 16 August 2007

It is a cold, clear morning, and the soldiers gathered at the airfield are singing ‘The Three Main Rules of Discipline’ as an American jet labelled ‘The Spirit of 76’...

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With war in Europe an immediate prospect in July 1914, the young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, felt a tinge of guilt at his growing excitement and ‘hideous...

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