President Gore and Other Things That Never Happened Edited by Duncan Brack Politico's, 384pp, £14.99 ISBN 1842751727

From the Great Reform Act of 1832 to the US presidential election in 2000, this anthology explores a series of "what ifs". Some are of limited relevance – such as "What if Michael Howard had become Conservative Party leader in 1997?" – while others, such as "What if Franz Ferdinand's assassin had missed in 1914?", could have changed the course of world history.

It is always tempting to idealise what might have been, as many commentators in this book have done. John Nichols is certainly a guilty party in his chapter on "President Gore". Others, however, have been more realistic, and use the premises to offer a reasoned analysis of where we are today. Simon Buckby and Jon Mendelson look at what might have happened if Yitzak Rabin had not been assassinated in 1995. Their piece threatens to become a hagiography, but they recognise that things are unlikely to have been very different had he lived.

This book is an exercise in the hypothetical, but there's a political agenda, too. An Inconvenient

Truth recently persuaded the "Governator" to rethink the energy policy of the world's tenth-largest economy. Perhaps President Gore would be better served with the subheading "things that never happened . . . or might still".

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