Making History By Stephen Fry

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Making History

by

Stephen Fry

Making History is a novel by Stephen Fry, who was born in Hampstead, London on Saturday, August 24, 1957 as the son of Alan and Marianne Fry. Except other books such as The Hippopotamus Fry also wrote some plays(e.g. Latin! in 1979) and films and the musical Me & My Girl. He also worked as an actor in the famous BBC series Blackadder.

Making History was first published in the United Kingdom in 1996 by Hutchinson. The book tells a fantasy-science fiction-time travelling story about a student named Michael Young who wants to eliminate the holocaust from the history books by preventing Adolf Hitler from being born. The book itself is divided into two books (in the first book every chapter title starts with "Making-", in the second every chapter title ends with "-History").

The story begins in Michael Young's house in Cambridge. Michael is an aspiring history student who just finished his doctoral thesis (he calls it Das Meisterwerk) about Hitler's roots. Because he's late for his lecture and his girlfriend Jane took their Renault he hurries to the university. In his pigeon-hole there he discovers a package that is supposed for Leo Zuckermann, he is willing to hand it over himself and gets to know him when the pages of his Meisterwerk where blown away by the wind and he helps him to collect them. They arrange to meet again in Leo Zuckermann's room the same day. They split and Michael goes on to visit his girlfriend who is also studying at the university but she studies biochemistry. He enters her lab to clear the conflict they had the day before. Their argument is not the important thing about his visit but the discovery of a pill she invented: little orange pill that makes man infertile.

The meeting in Leo Zuckermann's room is a discussion about Michael's interest in Adolf Hitler and leads to Leo's wish to read a copy of Michael's doctoral thesis. The other copy of the Meisterwerk Michael had given to Angus Alexander Hugh Fraser-Stuart (his professor) to read it. It turns out that Mr. Fraser-Stuart calls his thesis "garbage" and "insupportable" because it is partly written like a novel (in fact excerpts from the thesis are printed in the book Making History).

After the disaster with Mr. Fraser-Stuart he visits Zuckermann again who now shows him a fascinating invention of him: a device which one can uses to look into the past.

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