THE READER is left with the impression that Lipstadt is unfamiliar with the Dr Goebbels biography.
   In fact from late 1995 she and her Jewish pals masterminded the eventually successful campaign to blackmail and bludgeon St Martin's Press (SMP) into abandoning this project and violating their contract with Mr Irving, to publish this book on which he had worked for eight years in the world's archives, including the KGB archive in Moscow. She herself had never seen the book: only six copies were in the United States at that time.
   Seven editors at SMP had read and highly commended it, and it had been selected as Book of the Month by the Doubleday History Book Club for May 1996.
   It was when newspapers (The Washington Post and others) identified her role that Mr Irving attached a high priority to issuing proceedings in law against her.