An image from Ken Burns’s superb new three-part documentary The US and the Holocaust, which is showing on BBC4 Mondays Nobody does American history television quite like director Ken Burns. You know what you’re going to get from the country’s most famous documentary-maker. His films, more often than not co-produced with Lynn Novick, written by Geoffrey C Ward and narrated by actor Peter Coyote, are as instantly recognisable for what they’re not as what they are. Burns has no time for fast cuts, bombastic music or elaborate pyrotechnics. His tools include stately pacing, scrupulous research, well-informed interviewees, evocative archive footage...