Because really you’re about as American as chocolate chip biscuits. And yesterday you’d completed your thesis on the early years of Adolf Hitler and lived in Cambridge and had a girlfriend called Jane. And then you met an ageing physics professor with a time machine. Handy, because, as Jane noted, you could always zap back to 70s Manchester and separate the Gallagher brothers at birth. Or journey back to the Death Camps.

Stephen Fry strays onto Kim Newman territory with this, his third big-selling comic novel. The set-up is alternate history - what-if-isms. It’s a bit like the question that masquerades as philosophy in King’s The Dead Zone - if you could go back and put a bullet in Adolf’s head, would you? Should you? Mikey doesn’t quite do that, but the effect is the same. That’s where all that American stuff comes in.

Making History is less rigorously designed than Newman would have had it, but a whole lot funnier. And thankfully not crass. There’s potential here for some really crap gags, really tasteless stuff at the expense of one of history’s darkest hours. But Fry neatly side-steps that one to pose (if not answer) some pretty fundamental questions, smartly de-personalising this regime of its simple figurehead and restoring the twisted ideology. This book, for once, recognises that more than just Jews suffered at Nazi hands.

Odd then that this is also a lighter, punchier book than either The Liar or The Hippopotamus. Some of this stuff - the dull, technical, running-about stuff - is rendered as screenplay, just like Ben Elton in his execrable Popcorn, just because he could. Fry uses it to spare us in an already slightly overlong (getting on for 600 pages) book. He’s smart like that. He’s a comic-turned-novelist. Ben Elton, on the other hand, is neither.