Brian Sewell has compared it to a semi-religious experience; the Times calls it 'breathtakingly wonderful'. There's no doubt Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master, which opened last Thursday at the British Museum, is spring's blockbuster. But the museum's director, Neil MacGregor and the man behind it, has little time to rest on his laurels. Last week, he was in Beijing (for a day) to launch the touring show, Treasures of the World's Cultures: the British Museum After 250 Years; tomorrow, he's off to Nairobi to unveil a new show of east African artefacts organised in a historic collaboration with the National Museum of Kenya.  MacGregor firmly believes the museum should be a global resource.  'A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world,' he argues. 'The non-European world isn't "other" any more; it's part of us.'  For MacGregor, a museum is a 'machine that generates tolerance and dissent', a place where we can think how the world fits together. The lectures the museum gave on Mesopotamia just before the Iraq war began were packed out. There have been shows of Sudanese and Persian art, as well as discussions chaired by Jon Snow, exploring cultural heritage, politics and identity. And this summer, there will be an exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle East, focusing on the differing ways in which artists engage with Arabic script.  A twinkly, if mercurial figure, MacGregor wears his scholarship lightly (he quietly turned down a knighthood in 1999). He resembles a rather good-looking monk, far younger than his 60 years. Regarded as a 'national treasure' in a museum world that is renowned for its back-stabbing and hissy fits, he has a reputation for being rather unknowable, but also for being a social animal.  According to sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp, he holds 8am meetings at the museum where you're likely to find yourself sitting next to an MP, a trustee or a TV presenter, all debating a series of objects that he has selected from the collection. 'You come out feeling totally energised,' says Douglas Camp.  When MacGregor arrived at the British Museum in 2002, after 15 years as director of the National Gallery, the place was in turmoil. It was £3m in debt (after the transfer of the British Library to St Pancras and the building of the museum's Great Court). Staff had gone on strike for the first time in its 250-year history. Annual visitor figures had dropped alarmingly. People assumed that MacGregor would overhaul the finances, then concentrate on aesthetics.  But, arguably, his greatest achievement has been to return the museum to the founding principles that parliament set for it in 1753: 'To allow visitors to address through objects, both ancient and more recent, questions of contemporary politics and international relations.'  The British Museum was a product of the Enlightenment; it was built for the people, not as a royal possession. MacGregor compares it to the founding of the BBC, the Open University or even the internet. 'It was the place where people could come and inform themselves about the world in a practical way. It's no accident that the world's first public national museum was set up in Britain, which led Europe in terms of civic liberty and an uncensored press.'  Unsurprisingly, MacGregor has no interest in offering us a smug experience that merely reinforces what we already know. He wants us to emerge unsettled. 'Without in any way being party political, he is looking to stir the pot and be provocative,' says Snow. 'We had a huge debate on Iran, where he came up with six artefacts that somehow speak to what Iran was and where it's going. Then he brings in the ambassador, historians and scholars and fills the lecture theatre with people who find themselves debating culture, the past and how we resolve the occupation of neighbouring Iraq. I think before he arrived, people would have been hard pushed to believe that the BM had any relevance to resolving any current issues at all.'  Best of all, the BM has become a powerful, neutral forum. 'What is extraordinary,' says MacGregor, 'is that groups who have done terrible things to each other in the country in question can actually debate and discuss in the context of the museum. It's partly because it's a space that everyone knows belongs equally to all of them and partly, I think, the humility everybody feels in the face of objects this age. It sets the current political questions in a very, very different perspective.'  For all the charm, one senses he can be a tough operator. He had to make many staff redundant when he arrived. And he won't be sending the Elgin marbles back any time soon, insisting they are among a 'select group of key objects which are indispensable to the museum's core function to tell the story of human civilisation'.  There's no denying he is a brilliant diplomat. Last year's blockbuster, Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia was the product of meetings with Tehran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had just rejected British offers of economic concessions in return for an end to nuclear activities, was happy to loan art treasures to the British Museum.  He has the ear of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. For example, when in 2003 he wanted money for African projects, he knew what to do. 'I went to the PM and asked if for our 250th anniversary, the government would give us money to work in Africa and for Africans to come and work in the UK.'  Later that year, when news of the looting of the Baghdad Museum came through, it became 'blindingly clear' to MacGregor what he must do. He rang the Prime Minister and got American tanks deployed in front of the museum and secured an anonymous benefactor to fund a rescue mission. Within a week, BM curators were on a plane to Baghdad and Iraqi conservators were in Bloomsbury learning the latest technological developments.  MacGregor was born in Glasgow in 1946; his parents were doctors. He has said that, as a child, England was 'a foreign country we passed through' on the way to family holidays spent around French museums and galleries. There were only three possible professions in his family: medicine, the law or the church. From Glasgow Academy, he won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he studied French and German. He then won a scholarship to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to write a thesis on Diderot.  Unfortunately, the year was 1968 and in the heady summer of student rebellion, the thesis was never delivered. His father summoned him back to Glasgow to retrain for the Scottish bar. After qualifying, he practised as a lawyer for a few years. He was 27 before he decided to study for an MA at the Courtauld Institute. His tutors included Anthony Blunt who called him 'the most brilliant student I ever had'.  Five years as a lecturer in art history at Reading University followed and then he became editor of the Burlington Magazine. Next, he was chosen to succeed Michael Levey as director of the National Gallery. He found it tough to begin with. 'The first time you have to chair a meeting about something you know nothing about - air-conditioning ducts, for instance - it couldn't be more demoralising.'  Yet he employed great skill in transforming the gallery and presiding over the building of the Sainsbury wing. And he proved a great fundraiser. Single-handedly, he persuaded Yves Saint Laurent to donate £1m to help restore the gallery's north wing.  He could have stayed there forever, but then he was offered the British Museum. 'It was a wonderful stroke of good fortune to come to the museum not knowing it intimately. Because you set out and discover this extraordinary world in one building and that must be one of the most exhilarating things possible for anybody working in the museum world.'  Dubbed Saint Neil (he is a committed Christian), MacGregor is a bachelor. 'One's private life is so tragically uninteresting,' he told a journalist last year. 'You might imagine that there is this whole pulsating, scabrous existence going on that is kept from the public gaze. It would make my job easier if you could pony up something lurid. Sadly, it's not very interesting, but that's another saga.'  According to Snow: 'He has an enormous circle of friends - I'd even count myself - but beyond those, he gives it all to the job, and whatever else there is he keeps very private.'  He's very media-savvy. The museum has already taken part in several TV archaeology debates, including the compilation of Britain's Top 10 treasures, and it is currently being filmed by the BBC for a major series in the autumn.  MacGregor relaxes by hill walking and is said to throw wonderful dinner parties. But just at the moment, Michelangelo is his consuming passion. 'The British Museum has the greatest collection of Michelangelo drawings outside Florence and they can only - responsibly - be shown once in a generation. Every generation has a different Michelangelo. And this is our generation's chance.'  Born: 16 June 1946; son of Alexander and Anna MacGregor.  Education: New College, Oxford; Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris; University of Edinburgh; Courtauld Institute of Art.  Career: Member, Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh; lecturer in history of art and architecture, University of Reading, 1976-81; editor, the Burlington Magazine, 1981-87; director, National Gallery, 1987-2002. From 2002, director of the British Museum. Presenter of a number of television series: Making Masterpieces (1997), Painting the World (1999), Seeing Salvation (2000) and Michelangelo for BBC4 (2006)  What he says about the British Museum: 'The big challenge is to find the greatest number of ways to make it simple for the visitor to spend half an hour in the museum.  'Most people are completely overwhelmed on seeing the collection. We want to make it easier for more people to see less.'  What others say: Jon Snow, who has worked closely with him: 'It's incredible what he has achieved at the British Museum. He's just taken it by the horns and dragged it into the 21st century. Any idea that it's some private preserve of the British élite has been snuffed out. It's become very much a people's place - and all are encouraged to understand that everything in it belongs to them.'
The Observer profile: Neil MacGregor, the dynamic director of the British Museum, has thrilled the art establishment and pulled in the crowds with his unstuffy approach. Globalism is the keyword. Mind you, the Elgin marbles are staying put.