Changing dates with destiny

The rearrangement of history as a plot has had a good run in literature and the cinema, from H G Wells to Michael J Fox. In Making History, Stephen Fry asks similar questions. What if a certain person had not been born? What if the world had not taken a turn for the worse and ended up in the sorry state we are in today? Dabbling with history has many pleasant possibilities. Archduke Ferdinand could have cancelled his visit to Sarajevo. Kennedy could have travelled around Dallas in a closed car. Martin Luther King could have stayed at home the day he was shot. And perhaps Manchester United could have been prevented from winning their second double.

These are all appealing scenarios but not as enticing as The Big One.

What if someone was able to travel back in time and prevent the birth of Adolf Hitler? Surely, if the lunatic tyrant had been nipped in the bud, his mother Klara never conceiving the baby she had spent years longing for, the state of the world in the 1990s would be one of all-round hunky doriness.

This is what happens in Fry's novel, but the result is far from pleasing.

As any cod-philosopher will tell you, messing with the past is not a foolproof way of ensuring a mess-free present.

But in Making History, when the opportunity arises to nip back 100 years to try to prevent World War II and the Holocaust by throwing a handful of sterility pills in Frau Hitler's water supply, and then take cover under the safety of the 1990s, the temptation proves too great.

Michael Young, a Cambridge graduate unkindly dubbed the Keanu Reeves of History, is given the chance to return to the past. He grabs it, and then finds himself presiding over the botch that ensues.