From Mr David Irving Sir: Among other complaints, your reviewer
Professor Bogdanor writes (Books, 11 August) that my second volume of Churchill's War seeks to portray Churchill as 'a coward'. I sometimes wonder if reviewers actually read the books they are sent. That word does not appear in any of the 1,200 pages: on the contrary, I refer to Winston's courage in undertaking his wartime flights around the Middle East, to Moscow and to the USA.
Professor Bogdanor has, however, his own reasons for mistrusting me. He has somehow obtained the US edition of what he calls the 'magnificent book' by Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, on the Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd & Lipstadt action; he quotes extensively from it, but fails to mention that this neutral expert, on whom the court depended so heavily, was paid in excess of £70,181 by the defendants — an amount which Mr Justice Gray later admitted surprised even him; and that Professor Evans's own UK publishers, William Heinemann, have so far refused to print his book.
On one page Evans writes of 'Irving's seemingly limitless capacity for telling lies, distorting the truth, and insulting the memory of the dead' and, on the next, 'for all of us he became someone with whom the least contact was defiling'.
In order to stay in the game in the High Court, the same Professor Evans, your readers will find, had to assert precisely the opposite under cross-examination by me on 10 February last year, testifying on oath that he was quite neutral toward me: Evans: 'I have no personal feelings about you at all. Mr Irving.'
Irving: 'I had the impression from this morning's answers that you held something bordering between distaste and loathing towards me and the books I write, or the views that you perceive me to hold.'
Evans: 'Not at all,' He testified thus at the same time as he was writing his book. It could hardly be more blatant, To buttress the allegation that I habitually misuse sources, Professor Bogdanor doubts that I can know the content of the mysterious box 24 of the Walter Monckton papers in the Bodleian. When 1 last used those papers, in 1987, boxes 23 and 24 were firmly sealed until the end of the century. Box 23 was opened in 1999; box 24 is still closed, Says Bogdanor: 'The safest course is to accept nothing Irving says unless independently corroborated. Well, according to the Independent, 5 March 2000 (`Queen Mum Wanted Peace with Hitler'), a 'government source' had revealed that box 24 was being kept closed because the correspondence between Monckton (the royal family's lawyer) and Lord Halifax revealed Her Majesty's deep hostility to the war faction around Churchill. Just as I said, Your reviewer sneers: 'Box 23 was released last year .. it contains nothing on Hitler's peace offer. Box 24 remains closed, but contains quite unrelated material,' (How does your reviewer know, one might ask?) The Independent was told otherwise, I am thus corroborated, and independently. Is it safer to accept what I say now?
David Irving
London WI
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