From Chattanooga to China, the Lying book can be freely purchased and perused. But not in Chigwell, the birthplace of the conformist historian himself.

Monday, February 11, 2002
(London, England)

THE week begins well. There is word from a well informed source in New York that Professor Richard Evans's book Lying about Hitler has run into a dry stone wall quite without my intervention -- it seems that his own U.S. publishers Basic Books, Inc., who have peddled the Evans book up and down the length and breadth of their great nation, have belatedly recognised that the work should instead have been called Lying about David Irving.

On the advice of their own legal experts, the New York publishers have now seen through this fraud and phoney with rather greater acuity than Mr Justice Gray, the judge in the Lipstadt Trial, who scooped up every pearly word of wisdom that dropped from the lips of this highly paid Third Reich expert -- this witness who did not even know the name of Hitler's wartime ambassador to Paris, or the correct meaning of the German phrase daran glauben (it is slang for being bumped off, professor, not "believing in it").

After the commissioning publisher William Heinemann, Ltd., the highly respected Jewish firm in London who also produce Sir Martin Gilbert's works, rejected the Evans book on internal legal advice as being libellous, Granta Books stepped forward to pick up the wreckage and publicly announced to the press that they would publish it for him. Even Granta are not that stupid however, and nothing more has been heard of the plan.

It is an extraordinary situation: here is a book written by an expert who earned the highest praise from a British High Court judge for his expertise, a book said to be based solidly on the same expert report which clearly most swayed that judge, and yet everybody outside the privileged aura of the High Court recognises that it contains so many lies that they dare not touch it.

That is what the law of libel is about. The book is written by a man whose objectivity and neutrality was an essential element of his standing as an expert witness -- indeed, he attested to it under oath when challenged: yet the book he was writing even as he testified turns out to be so vile that nobody in this country will print it.

In the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, France and no doubt elsewhere the Evans opus Lying has been peddled, printed, purchased, and praised. From Chattanooga to China, the Lying book can be freely purchased and perused.

But not in Chigwell, the birthplace of the conformist historian himself.

Not so long as I am alive and kicking anyway, and I can tell Evans and his ilk that the latest check-up I had gives them scant cause for hope on that score.

Behind the scenes, author Evans and his agent Peter Robinson -- the literary agent, not the superstore -- pleaded with Basic Books Inc. to ship a container-load of their books over to these shores, and at first it was even advertised on Amazon.com and other locations with a U.K. publication date of this coming May. But the U.S. editor of the book, Don Fehr, has told friends, "We are NOT planning on publishing a UK edition of the book," and he emphasises the word NOT. "There are too many problems and complications."

Those words land in my mail tray this Monday morning, just as the first letters from me are landing in the mail-trays of every major book distributor in the U.K. warning them of precisely the "problems and complications" that will rain down on them if they disseminate the lies of Evans.

I could have saved that postage. Pity, I need every penny I can get for the next round of the battle against these enemies of Real History.

Relevant items on this website:

Richard Evans index

Lipstadt case and pleadings

Transcripts of Lipstadt trial