It was appropriate to write that as he did in 1939, and it is appropriate for us all to remember it today.

I think I read somewhere once that the first rule of timetravel is that you try to kill Hitler, and the second rule is that it either doesn't work, or things get even worse. In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts. If you cannot imagine yourself wanting to riot against Catholic emancipation, say, or becoming an early Tory and signing up to fight with the Old Pretender, or cheering on Prynne as the theatres are closed and Puritanism holds sway ... knowing is not enough. If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: 'Wilkes and Liberty!' or, indeed, cried: 'Death to Wilkes!', if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them. Ocr tesseract 4.1.1 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9838 Ocr_module_version 0.0.7 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19891 Openlibrary_edition Making History has one of the most uniquely mind-bending plots I have ever come across. Michael Young, a student pursuing a Ph.D. in History, encounters a non-assuming physics professor on a fateful day, thereby changing his life and the whole course of history. They both fixate on the idea of how the world would turn out if Adolf Hitler had never been born, and set about to make it into reality. Uchronia)র আবির্ভাব; এবং বর্তমানে শুধু অল্টারনেট হিস্ট্রি বইয়ের তালিকা রাখার জন্য আখ্রনিয়া ডট নেট নামে একটা ওয়েবসাইট আছে।I am aware that my extreme aversion to this literary device is subjective – probably connected to the fact that books are my first and major love, while films are okay, I suppose…. However, I did find the film script sections really spoilt the book for me. Having said that, up to the point it all went Courier I found the depiction of the alternate world engrossing and chilling in equal measure. Fry is good at writing minor characters memorably and the flashes of humour helped alleviate what could have been a grim read, given the subject matter. Edith Peers and John McLinden both have authority in dual roles, while Ruaraidh Hastie’s raisin-scoffing spook has a nice line in misleading bonhomie. All of the roles, down to Sheila Thomson’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pancake server, contribute to a finely tuned ensemble. praiseworthy This is not really a science-fiction book though. Apart from some techno-babble, we're never really told how the time-machine works, and that's not the point of the book either. It focusses on the consequences, which, despite the rather neat tech, are pretty horrible all around. Fortunately, a bit of human decency and compassion has survived. So this eventually turns into a bit of a romance too. We all know the cliches; the middle-class man reads biography and history, especially military history; the wife carries on reading novels, because men 'get' abstraction, numbers and grand strategy and women 'get' relationships. Men do seem to like history; history becomes their bedtime reading, their sitting-down version of golf, dare one say? Sadly, as a lover, seeker and searcher of time travel fiction, this one doesn't make the recommendation list. perhaps it is that Fry just ain't my guy. Perhaps it's that two tangential minds that have the propensity to live on the extremes of mood and emotions, don't really fit. I've tried with you Stephen, I really have.

Fry's humour is very clever, but doesn't take away all the seriousness in the book; it is well-balanced. His references to pop culture really amused me and I liked that sometimes he changed to a film script format. It gave a nice touch to the book.Even tho I love Stephen Fry's books (and pretty much everything else he shares with the world), Making History has been lingering on my kindle without even tempting me to start this. Why is that? We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are. This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.

Making History is a fantastic example of alternate history. I particularly enjoyed how Fry shows the same scene, set during World War I, twice, once from the original timeline and once from the timeline after Michael erases Hitler. It’s an “oh shit” moment as the reader realizes the magnitude of what Michael has done. It’s a foregone conclusion that the new world is going to be somehow less preferable to the old one, but it’s not immediately obvious how that’s the case. Fry reveals more about the new timeline gradually, giving the reader time to acclimatize alongside Michael, who must pretend like everything is cool to throw off some suspicious G-men even while he secretly freaks out and wants to find a way to restore the original timeline. History, then, as one long, grovelling apology or act of self-abasement and self-laceration. A history in which historians have to stand on one side of an argument or another, for, in between, they are nothing but dry-as-dust statisticians. Or we see historians as creepy hindsight critics who can, in the safety of their studies, point out to Alexander the Great and Napoleon where they went wrong and how they would have done it better. Technically, this is praiseworthy, with the lighting of Ian Cunningham adding atmosphere. Farrimond’s sound design also impresses; the use of period-appropriate pop music, something that so often irritates in its obviousness, works here because of the obvious care with which it is done. Such care suffuses every aspect of this impressive production.

But ... isn't history now just point of view, tribal assertion, cultural propaganda? After all, the days of Burke, Macaulay, Gibbon, Trevelyan and Froude are over. Historians are no longer grandees at the centre of a fixed civilisation; they are simply journalists writing about celebrities who haven't got the grace to be alive any more. Certainly, some people sense in our world, even if they can't prove it, a new and bewildering contempt for the past. In the high street of life, as it were, no one seems to look above the shop-line. Today's plastic signage at street level is the focus; yesterday's pilasters, corbels and pediments above are neither noticed nor considered, save by what some would call cranks and conservationists. Israeli researcher Asaf Ben Vered [3] noted that "The protagonist of Making History gets told that "There are no Jews left in Europe". That result could not have been achieved solely by sterilizing Jewish men through the "Braunau Water". In that case, in the 1990s there should have still been a big number of sad old and middle aged Jews with no progeny, and the Nazis could not have kept them completely hidden from the world. Plus, if only Jewish men were sterilized, at least some Jewish women would have let themselves be impregnated by non-Jewish men; in fact, Jewish religious law specifically stipulates that such children would be considered Jewish. (...) Anyway, why would Gloder do it at all? To be sure, he is an anti-semite, like many Germans of his time. But as seen from his cynically frank wartime diary, he is above all a completely ruthless and totally unprincipled opportunist, for whom German Nationalism and wartime heroism are simply tools to be used or discarded. He needed the Jewish nuclear scientists to develop nuclear bombs by 1938. He still needs them when entering a nuclear arms race with the US. Were the Jewish scientists and their families exempted from deportation to the "Jewish Free State"? Would they go on working for him when all other Jews were deported? (...) The book avoids the real moral dilemma which it could have easily posed and which would have made it a far more profound and thought-provoking work. Suppose the opportunist Gloder had altogether avoided the Final Solution, and contented himself with some anti-Jewish rhetoric. Which world would be worse? Our world - or a world with an entrenched Nazi dictatorship in Europe and a racist and homophobic America, but no gas chambers and ovens, six million Jews able to live out their life, even if under Nazi rule? Putting it this way, the protagonist would have needed at least some serious thinking and inner debate before proceeding as he does in the final chapters."