[2] Macartney was a research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
From 1936 to 1946 he was in charge of the Hungarian section of the Foreign Office Research Department.
From 1951 to 1957 he was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.
[1] In 1974, Macartney was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria.
[2][5] In 1923 he married Nedelya Mamacheva (Nedella Mamarchev-Macartney, 1898 – 1989) the daughter of a Bulgarian army colonel: there were no recorded children of this marriage.