'MAKING HISTORY' BY STEPHEN FRY, CHANGING HISTORY

Making History by Stephen Fry

Tonight, Europe commemorates the beginning of The Liberation of Paris, also known as the Battle for Paris and Belgium. It was a military battle that took place during World War II from 19 August 1944 until the German garrison surrendered the French capital on 25 August 1944. Paris had been ruled by Nazi Germany since the signing of the Second Compiègne Armistice on 22 June 1940, after which the Wehrmacht occupied northern and western France.

The liberation began when the French Forces of the Interior -the military structure of the French Resistance- staged an uprising against the German garrison upon the approach of the US Third Army, led by General George Patton.

On the night of 24 August, elements of General Philippe Leclerc's 2nd French Armored Division made their way into Paris and arrived at the Hôtel de Ville shortly before midnight.

The next morning, 25 August, the bulk of the 2nd Armored Division and US 4th Infantry Division entered the city. Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison and the military governor of Paris, surrendered to the French at the Hôtel Meurice, the newly established French headquarters. General Charles de Gaulle of the French Army arrived to assume control of the city as head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic.

More information: Euronews

The Grandma has decided to commemorate this event reading Making History, one of the most popular novels of Stephen Fry, the English actor, comedian and writer who was also born on a day like today in 1957.

Fry wrote this ironic novel whose plot involves the creation of an alternative historical time line, one where Adolf Hitler never existed. The novel is a critic against totalitarianism, dictatorships, single thought and a chant in a favour of freedom, rights of minorities and tolerance.

The Grandma loves Stephen Fry's works and admires his intelligence. She is also a great follower of Fry's English Delight, a BBC Radio 4 documentary series in which Stephen Fry, who is a language enthusiast, explores various aspects of the English language. It is a great tool to learn and improve your English language.

Before reading Making History, The Grandma had been studying a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 14. Schemes and views (I) (Spanish Version)

Stephen John Fry (24 August 1957) is an English actor, comedian and writer. He and Hugh Laurie are the comic double act Fry and Laurie, who starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster.

Fry's acting roles include a Golden Globe Award–nominated lead performance in the film Wilde, Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, the title character in the television series Kingdom, a recurring guest role as Dr Gordon Wyatt on the crime series Bones, and as Gordon Deitrich in V for Vendetta.

Stephen Fry

He has written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award–winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, which saw him explore his bipolar disorder, and the travel series Stephen Fry in America. He was also the long-time host of the BBC television quiz show QI, with his tenure lasting from 2003 to 2016.

Besides working in television, Fry has contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines and written four novels and three volumes of autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, The Fry Chronicles, and More Fool Me. He also appears frequently on BBC Radio 4, starring in the comedy series Absolute Power, being a frequent guest on panel games such as Just a Minute, and acting as chairman during one series of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, where he was one of a trio of possible hosts who were tried out to succeed the late Humphrey Lyttelton, Jack Dee getting the post permanently.

Fry is also known for his voice-overs, reading all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the UK audiobook recordings, narrating the LittleBigPlanet and Birds of Steel series of video games, as well as an animated series of explanations of the laws of cricket, and a series of animations about Humanism for Humanists UK.

More information: Stephen Fry

Fry was born in Hampstead, London on 24 August 1957 to Marianne Eve Fry and Alan John Fry (1930-2019), a British physicist and inventor. Fry's father is English, and his paternal grandmother had roots in Kent and Cheshire. The Fry family originates in Dorset, at Shillingstone and Blandford; in the early 1800s, Samuel Fry -second son of James Fry, of Shillingstone and Blandford- settled in Surrey, with his descendants residing in Middlesex.

Fry's mother is Jewish, but he was not brought up in a religious family. His maternal grandparents, Martin and Rosa Neumann, were Hungarian Jews, who emigrated from Šurany, now Slovakia, to Britain in 1927. Rosa Neumann's parents, who originally lived in Vienna, were sent to a concentration camp in Riga, Latvia, where they were murdered by the Nazis. His mother's aunt and cousins were sent to Auschwitz and Stutthof and never seen again. Many of Stephen Fry's ancestors were Quakers. He is also related to Joseph Fry and the Fry family who founded the chocolate company called Fry, Vaughan & Company. His ancestor John Fry signed the death warranty for King Charles I.

More information: @stephenfry

Since the publication of his first novel, The Liar (1991), Fry has written three further novels, several non-fiction works and three volumes of autobiography.  

Making History (1996) is partly set in an alternative universe in which Adolf Hitler's father is made infertile and his replacement proves a rather more effective Führer. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. The Hippopotamus (1994) is about Edward (Ted/Tedward) Wallace and his stay at his old friend Lord Logan's country manor in Norfolk.

Stephen Fry

The Hippopotamus was later adapted into a 2017 film. The Stars' Tennis Balls (2000) is a modern retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. Fry's book The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within is a guide to writing poetry. When writing a book review for Tatler, Fry wrote under a pen name, Williver Hendry, editor of A Most Peculiar Friendship: The Correspondence of Lord Alfred Douglas and Jack Dempsey, a field close to his heart as an Oscar Wilde enthusiast. Once a columnist in The Listener and The Daily Telegraph, he now writes a weekly technology column in the Saturday edition of The Guardian. His blog attracted more than 300,000 visitors in its first two weeks.

In May 2009, Fry unveiled The Dongle of Donald Trefusis, an audiobook series following Donald Trefusis -a fictional character from Fry's novel The Liar and from the BBC Radio 4 series Loose Ends-, set over 12 episodes. After its release, it reached No. 1 on the UK Album Chart list. Ultimately however only three episodes were released, the rest with the note exact release date pending.

Fry's use of the word luvvie, spelled lovie by Fry, in The Guardian on 2 April 1988, is given by the Oxford English Dictionary as the earliest recorded use of the word as a humorous synonym for actor.

Fry was, at one time, slated to adapt A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole for the big screen.

More information: BBC

Making History (1996) is the third novel by Stephen Fry. The plot involves the creation of an alternative historical time line, one where Adolf Hitler never existed. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

The story is told in first person by Michael Puppy Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother. He meets Professor Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has a strong personal interest in Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Michael assumes this is due to his Jewish heritage. However, it is later revealed that Leo was born Axel Bauer, the son of Dietrich Bauer, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz. Leo has developed a machine that enables the past to be viewed -but it is of no practical use as the image is not resolvable into details. Together, they hatch a plan to modify the machine such that it can be used to send something back into time.

Time changes again. Expecting the disorientation, Michael comes to his senses faster now and discovers that almost everything is back to how it was, except that his favourite band, Oily-Moily, never existed. He gives up his career in academia, figuring he can at least make some money writing he songs that he remembers from the previous reality. Finally, Michael is reunited with Steve, who also remembers the previous reality. 

More information: The Guardian

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words

to paper over structural cracks.

Stephen Fry