In 1999 David Irving, a right-wing chronicler of Hitler's regime, sued Penguin Books, claiming he had been falsely labelled a Holocaust denier in a book by the American professor Deborah Lipstadt. He maintained that there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz, no systematic mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, and that the whole Holocaust story is exaggerated.
The story of the trial is at the centre of this book. It is a true courtroom drama. Irving is a flamboyant and self-publicising character, given to provocative pronouncements; and an exotic entourage. He conducted his own case. D D Guttenplan had complete access to the courtroom and to Irving through the trial, and his rounded portrait of the man is as devastating as it is fair-minded. But Irving is only one of the book's characters, who include Charles Gray, the patrician judge, Anthony Julius, solicitor and iconoclastic scholar, Richard Rampton, Penguins' sharp-minded QC, and the pugnacious Professor Richard Evans, who spent twenty-eight hours in the witness box demolishing Irving's scholarship.
This is also a book about the wider debate over the Holocaust and about the nature of historical truth. Guttenplan insists that we cannot close off discussion of the Holocaust, even as it needs to be defended from outright revisionists.
