Iain MacGregor

I admire Lincoln for the humanity he brought to the presidency. I became interested in the subject when… I was a teenager in the late 1970s. I was lucky that I had politically minded parents who wanted to visit Eastern Europe. I was sent to East Germany on a Scout trip in 1979 – perhaps they were trying to get rid of me! – and two years later to Leningrad, as it then was, in the Soviet Union. My abiding memory is of the big belching American-made trucks, supplied to the Russians during the Second World War. They were everywhere. I’m lucky that my passion for history translated into a job in publishing, where over the past 30 years I’ve had the chance to work with amaz