Margaret MacMillanNew York: Random House, 2003. xxxi, 570pp, $25.95 paper (ISBN 0-375-76052-0)This book has garnered wide praise since its original publication in the United Kingdom in 2001, under the title of Peacemakers. No one who reads Professor MacMillan's comprehensive, balanced and elegant treatment of the peace negotiations that ended the First World War should have any reason to dispute its praiseworthiness. Nor could there be much to object to in the subtitle: these were, indeed, six months that changed the world, and the changes continue to be felt down to this moment.I will leave it to the historians of the Paris peace settlement to judge how this book will stack up against the large body of scholarship on the topic; suffice it to say that the political scientist in me would be somewhat dismayed, and very surprised, were practitioners of the senior discipline not to deem MacMillan's account of what went on at Paris to be among the best works published in English (or any other language, for that matter). My own judgements are necessarily coloured by a disciplinary bias in favour of usable history, and for political scientists and specialists in international relations there is so much value in Paris 1919 that it would take more space than have available here to do full justice to it.So let me highlight a few of my reasons for liking this book. First, MacMillan is a superb writer, with an effective, nuanced, way of making her point, economically and often with just the right injection of humour. For example, when commenting upon the delight shown by the Lebanese Christians and the French that the latter should be rediscovering the Levant, she observes that the Maronites not only claimed a lengthy historical relationship with France (viz., the Crusades), but that, important perhaps, they admired French culture almost as much as the French themselves (p 392).Nor is it only her own bons mots that so enliven this book; MacMillan is wonderful at reproducing some of the most priceless verbal gems of the peacemakers, one of whom, David Lloyd George, happened to be her great-grandfather. Testifying to his own, and to the peacemakers' general, ignorance of central and eastern European affairs, the British prime minister commented apropos the question of Polish frontiers with Ukraine, I only saw a Ukrainian once. It is the last Ukrainian have seen, and am not sure that want to see any more. Lloyd George most certainly saw more than he wished of his French counterpart, Georges Clemenceau, of whom he memorably remarked that [h]e loved France but hated all Frenchmen (p 30). …