Neil MacGregor
Neil MacGregor was born on 16 June 1946 in Glasgow, Scotland. He attended The Glasgow Academy before pursuing an education that took him across several of Europe's leading institutions, including the University of Edinburgh, New College, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
That broad academic formation fed into a career as an art historian, non-fiction writer, and podcaster. His professional life began to take shape in the early 1980s when he served as editor of the Burlington Magazine, a role he held from 1981 to 1987. He then moved into institutional leadership, becoming Director of the National Gallery in London in 1987, a post he held until 2002. He followed that with the directorship of the British Museum, serving from 2003 to 2015 — a span of more than twelve years at one of the world's largest public museum collections.
After leaving the British Museum, MacGregor crossed into continental Europe to take up the role of founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, a position he held until 2018. That appointment brought a distinct geographical dimension to the later phase of his career, extending his institutional work into Germany. Over the course of his career he accumulated a substantial range of honours, among them the Order of Merit, the Goethe Medal, the Friedrich Gundolf Prize, the German National Prize, and the Montyon Prize. He also received the Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia, a doctor honoris causa from Paris-Sorbonne University, and an honorary doctorate.
MacGregor's last recorded institutional role was the founding directorship of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, where his tenure concluded in 2018.
Quotes by Neil MacGregor
Neil MacGregor's insights on:
That idea of the state as a ship and its ruler as the helmsman or captain is a very old one in European culture. It is frequently used by Cicero, and indeed our word ‘governor’ comes from the Latin for ‘helmsman’ – gubernator. Even more enticingly, the root of gubernator is the Greek kubernetes, which is also the origin of our word ‘cybernetics’; so the notions of ruling, steering and robotics all coincide in our language – and in this galleon.
Johnstoune’s copy of the First Folio is now in Meisei University in Tokyo, but I can read it in London on my smartphone.
It was in fact the British who first produced Beetles after the end of the Second World War, for their occupation forces.
Seventeenth-century Europe was still largely illiterate – even in the cities no more than a third of people could read – so prints with images and just a few key words were the most effective means of mass communication. Even today we all know a well-crafted cartoon can be lethal in public debate.
Napoleon famously said that, to understand a man, you need to understand the world when he was twenty years old.
Elizabethan Twitter feed; they carried news quickly, spread it widely, and their relationship to the truth was similarly easy-going.
