I've always loved reading diaries and memoirs and just getting a sense of different personalities and what made them tick as individuals.

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.

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

Margaret MacMillan Quotes