Did this reflect their own characters, or that of their nations?But, though touched on, these are never developed. Television style instead demands a combination of the clever remark to camera and the flip relevance for our times. David Starkey pioneered the form, Niall Ferguson repeated it on the broader canvas of empire, and Roberts, a Cambridge man with a more earnest bent than Ferguson’s Oxford taste for paradox, goes for the “leadership lessons” chopped up in gobbets, many quotations from recent books and few much more enlightening than a populist management textbook. As for modern relevance, any analogy between a small country facing invasion from a military force in control of a continent and a hyperpower beating up on a Third World country debilitated by sanctions eludes me.That BBC2 – the gifted producer Laurence Rees, no less – should encourage this overhasty dash to board the TV history bandwagon is sad enough.
But the price of the book is truly scandalous: £18.99 for 180 pages of text! You could buy both Roy Jenkins’s acute appreciation of Churchill as a politician and Ian Kershaw’s masterly two-volume biography of Hitler for not much more – and be infinitely better informed.. WHY GO NOW?
WHY GO NOW?
Carnival is the time when D?ldorf, dismissively referred to by those Germans who don’t live there as “the office desk of the Ruhr”, decides it’s time to party Fortunately, David Brent is not in charge. In all, a million people will take part or watch the parades. Tomorrow (Thursday 27 February) is the first of carnival’s “crazy days”, when women wear fancy dress to work before everyone heads to the Alter Markt, where the street carnival is officially opened.
From here on you are confronted with 96 hours of more or less unrelenting partying, eating, dancing and drinking, starting with Thursday evening’s bender, known as Weiberfastnacht. Friday represents something of a pause for breath but the bars open early on Saturday morning to serve pick-me ups, or “Fr?hoppen”. On Sunday, school children parade through the city centre in fancy dress while the evening is taken up with more street parties and masked balls. Everything climaxes with the official parade on Rose Monday, 3 March with a colourful spectacle of thousands of people in fancy dress, colourful carnival figures, cart-wheelers, clowns and bank staff wearing red noses.
The timetable says the fun starts at 10.49am and, this being Germany, it almost certainly will. Neighbouring Cologne’s carnival is bigger but also more contrived and industrial.For more information on the carnival, contact the D?ldorf tourist office at , e-mail tourist duesseldorf-tourismus.de, or call 00 49 211 172 020. In the UK, the German tourist board (020-7317 0908, .uk) can also provide details.DOWN PAYMENTBuzz (0870 240 7070; ) flies from Stansted to D?ldorf with fares this weekend from £105. By booking in advance and travelling at less popular times, fares can cost around £65 return. British Airways (0845 77 333 77; ) flies from Heathrow with last minute flights for the carnival starting at £102.