Focal Point Publications (FPP) began its operations in 1980, created by David Irving's Focus Group, a small, ad hoc society of Londoners interested in preserving the British way of life. For a while it issued an irregular newsletter, Focal Point, to a mailing list of about five hundred. The group spawned an informal private dining society, The Clarendon Club, which met irregularly until the activities of the traditional enemies of Free Speech made further meetings virtually impossible. As these pressures began, roughly in 1982, FPP began to take action to preserve what Mr Irving calls Real History. He founded an International Campaign for Real History, conducting a campaign of historical lectures at universities and to public societies, which took him around the world several times. In 1987 an associated publisher in Australia issued the first volume of Mr Irving's biography of Winston Churchill. In June 1989 FPP issued The Leuchter Report, a controversial, perhaps even flawed, first forensic investigation of the WW2 Nazi concentration camp site at Auschwitz. In 1991 FPP republished Hitler's War. The lavish quality of its output has attracted envy. Attempts to silence him redoubled. American publishers came under pressure not to publish US editions of FPP titles. Ugly pressures were already beginning on the British publishing industry in an attempt to force FPP out of business. Mr Irving's flagship biography of the Nazi leader Hitler was followed in short order by his transcript of the unpublished 1938 diaries of Dr Joseph Goebbels (right), then in 1996 by a full-scale biography of the Nazi propaganda minister and in 1997 by Mr Irving's history of the post-war Nuremberg trials. The year 2001 saw the publication of Churchill's War, vol. ii, andthe following year the Millennium edition of "Hitler's War". Plans were abandoned to publish Joe Bellinger's book on Heinrich Himmler's mysterious suicide, on quality grounds, while a book by Mark Deavin on Harold Macmillan's Hidden Agenda has made only slow prsogress; future publications were to include a work on the Allied liberation of Dachau concentration camp but author Charles Provan died before he could complete it. David Irving's books are available through his own online Focal Point bookstore. Despite the continuing pressures to silence him, Mr Irving persists, with FPP, in what he describes as ploughing (plowing) a straight furrow.
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