David Irving
David John Cawdell Irving (born 24 March 1938) is an English writer and Holocaust denier, who specialises in the military and political history of World War II, with a focus on Nazi Germany. He is the author of 30 books on the subject, including The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Hitler's War (1977), Uprising! (1981), Churchill's War (1987), and Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (1996).
His work on Nazi Germany became controversial because of his sympathy for the Third Reich, antisemitism and racism. He has associated with far right and neo-Nazi causes, famously during his student days seconding British Union of Fascists founder Oswald Mosley in a University College London debate on immigration. He has been described as "the most skillful preacher of Holocaust denial in the world today".
Irving's reputation as an historian was widely discredited after he brought an unsuccessful libel case against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist, who "associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism", and that he had "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".
Read more about David Irving: Early Life, Student Years, The Destruction of Dresden, Author, Racism and Antisemitism, Persona Non Grata, Reception By Historians
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“Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”
—Washington Irving (1783–1859)