Dramatis Personae

The first thing that strikes you about Margaret MacMillan’s new book is the unusual selection of personalities she profiles. Her chapter headings are also unconventional: “Hubris,” “Daring,” “Curiosity,” “Observers” and “Persuasion and the Art of Leadership.” The latter focuses on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Otto von Bismarck and William Lyon Mackenzie King. Her chapter on hubris more conventionally studies Hitler, Stalin, Woodrow Wilson and—unconventionally—Margaret Thatcher. Her chapter that looks at curiosity is a refreshing portrait of women who have often been ignored by historians: Elizabeth Simcoe in colonial Canada, Fanny Parkes in India and Edith Durham in Albania.

One thing that unites these themes and personalities, big and small, is MacMillan’s anger at the historical profession’s disdain for narrative history and the role of the individual. “Sadly,” she writes in her introduction, “biographers themselves, as well as historians who use biography, have too...