Climate change respects no borders.
— Margaret MacMillan
I've always loved reading diaries and memoirs and just getting a sense of different personalities and what made them tick as individuals.
I've always been interested in war, but especially its effects on society, which means bringing in the voices of women, which aren't heard as much in the grand narratives.
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.
We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.
I'm not sure I'm going to say that women and men are exactly the same. I think we may have different ways of approaching things, different sensitivities, and women are often better than men at picking up emotional cues.
War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.
History belongs to everyone. I don't think you have to give up scholarly standards. But I also don't think you want to write something that is impenetrable. You try as hard as you can to be readable.
If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.
History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.
You shouldn't expect people in the past to do things they couldn't have done.
No one is always right.
The act of apology is something that most societies take very seriously indeed. It is an admission of wrong done to the victims and an acceptance of blame.
How curious that such an outsize man, in physique as well as personality, should be remembered today mainly for giving his name to a small fish. For the 19th century, Bismarck was no herring but a leviathan. Between 1862 and 1890, he created Germany, seeing off first the Austrian empire and then France.
It's not going to be easy to create a world where both sides prefer peace, but we have to try.
Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.
Are artists the canaries in the mine, warning of the coming explosion before anyone else? It's hard to look at the world before 1914 and not wonder if they somehow felt a catastrophe was bearing down on them and their societies.
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.
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.
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.
I'm interested in the balance between big currents in history - the economies, the ideologies, social structures, and so on - and the decisions that people have to make. At the heart of all these great decisions to go to war, there are human beings who have to say, 'Yes, let's do it,' or 'No, we won't do it.'
Living through times of rapid change can be exhilarating, but it also can be very difficult.
If we don't take responsibility for each other, it seems to me the future is going to be even bleaker.
Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.
I like to think I'm a recovering historian.
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.
I do tend to look at individuals and whether they do or do not matter in history.
Poor little Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, or whatever her name is. It must be incredible at that age to be surrounded by people telling you you're wonderful.
Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.
The Canadian government has had a field day apologising for past policies towards a series of ethnic groups: Italian, Ukrainian, Sikh, Chinese, Japanese and Jews.
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.
We can prevent fighting by limiting weapons or finding nonviolent ways to end disputes.
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.
By the start of August 1914, it was dawning on the British that a major war was about to break out on mainland Europe. Public opinion and, crucially, the cabinet was deeply divided on whether to intervene or stay out.
If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.
Women are so much a part of war, even if they tend to see another side of it. To say they don't understand war is ridiculous.
Maintaining peace can be as strenuous as winning a war.
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.
I think what we should do as historians is understand. And we can have our own views about how things turned out, but I think, in making judgements, we're getting into tricky territory.
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.
Use it, enjoy it, but always handle history with care.
If you start thinking war is inevitable, then in your own times, you don't resist it as strongly as you should.
When I sat down to make a list of characters in history who exhibited curiosity, most were women. I thought it was sheer accident, and then I began to wonder.
History matters.
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.
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.
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.
If a bully wants to beat you up, you have the choice of running away or standing your ground. In our society, we have police forces who try to control bullies, sometimes by force.
Some might argue humans are hard-wired to fight. I don't agree: we are conscious beings who have the capacity to make decisions.
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.
