PERHAPS EVANS. who seems mildly apoplectic, ought not to read what Christopher Hitchens wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in April 2002, in which he effectively stated that the major Churchill biographies are now more or less quarried from the research reproduced in my Churchill's War. See the excerpts of his article in my Radical's Diary, and Hitchen's defence of his article in the next issue of the journal. Writes Hitchens: "If Sir Martin Gilbert's work is the quarry from which the wagons of orthodoxy continue to trundle away, laden with the building blocks for lesser edifices of loyalism, then Irving's projected trilogy Churchill's War is the dynamite that lies still unexploded around the quarry," and he concludes: "Internal evidence strongly suggests that Ponting, Charmley, and Jenkins have read Irving with keen attention, and have used him to enlarge their narratives without appearing to bow to his influence."  Not much lasting sign of criticism there, is there Prof. Evans? Better get squirting again!