The period that followed was spent studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (coinciding with the events of May 1968), and as a law student at Edinburgh University, where he received the Green Prize.

[8] From September 2010 to January 2011 the British Museum lent the ancient Persian Cyrus Cylinder to an exhibition in Tehran, Iran.

[9] Holding tenure when the Acropolis Museum in Athens was completed, MacGregor followed previous Directors in arguing against returning the sculptures from the Parthenon (the "Elgin Marbles") to Greece.

[13] The legal basis of various Ottoman documents, now lost, to which the British Museum has traditionally appealed in order to claim ownership of the sculptures is disputed.

[16][17] In January 2008, MacGregor was appointed chairman of the World Collections programme, for training international curators at British museums.

[18] The exhibition The First Emperor, focussing on Qin Shi Huang and including a small number of his Terracotta Warriors, was mounted in 2008 in the British Museum Reading Room.

That year MacGregor was invited to succeed Philippe de Montebello as the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

[25] In September 2014 UK domestic transmission started of his similarly formatted series Germany: Memories of a Nation on BBC Radio 4, with a major supporting exhibition at the British Museum.

[26] In 2017, MacGregor hosted a BBC Radio Four series Living with the Gods, on expressions of religious faith, liaising with Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Director of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai, on the presentation of world cultures.

[33] In April 2023, MacGregor was one of the 22 personal guests at the ceremony in which former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for special achievement by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Schloss Bellevue in Berlin.