Back in about 1970, as I drove our children home past Buckingham Palace, I remarked that the Queen was home, as the royal standard was flying. 'Does she know how close she lives to No. 81 Duke Street?' asked Josephine.

September 13, 2005 (Tuesday)
London (England)

UP at six-thirty a.m. and drive Jessica to school. I feel more relaxed now that we have a clear choice of one or two rental homes to move to (unless things go wrong); finance is of course a huge obstacle.

7 pm TV producer Bill comes for dinner. We drive up to the [restaurant] and sit outside until it gets too cold. We talk of many things, his film on Reszö Kasztner (who was, he says, screwing Joel Brand's wife Hansi), the lack of any film footage anywhere of Kasztner; Adolf Eichmann, (one son is a very uncooperative professor at Heidelberg, the other, Dieter, more screwball and helpful.) He says he wants to approach [--], his usual commissioning TV firm, to commission a film on my life in his series "The Real Benito Mussolini," etc.

Would I cooperate? Of course, I trust him implicitly. Which he is clever enough no doubt to have realized. We discuss his film on Mussolini; he says, on my inquiry, that he had an eye-witness, Frattuori(??), who related that the killing of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci as it eventually occurred was not planned that way, nor was it in front of the gates where other historians have it, but elsewhere -- somebody's gun went off, shooting Mussolini, and they then finished Clara off as well, and having done that they liquidated all his entourage too; the plan had been her to take the two down into Milan, to the square where their bodies were eventually draped by their feet from lamp standards, put them on trial and shoot them at the end of the day.

September 14, 2005 (Wednesday)
London (England)

AT ELEVEN a.m. the printer comes with proofs of Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden, the picture section; the pictures have reproduced really well, under the circumstances -- the old 1961 East German copy transparencies were badly washed out.

I pack more boxes. The back is beginning to hurt from the lifting; I have carried a ton of books up from our store downstairs ready for the move.

12:30 bank manager should have come for lunch, but he comes at 1:30. Is okay with the new move. After discussing it with Rebecca from the agency I formally submit our rental offer for the Britannia Road house. Less than we pay here but much larger.

Vanessa F. then phones, still eager to get me into the Queen Anne's Gate rental property she is offering. I diffidently say, offer the owner [...] as my top offer. She does not sound shocked. It would be nice to get in there, but what a price he is asking!

September 15, 2005 (Thursday)
London (England)

SUPPER at Prezzo's with Jessica. At 9:51 pm this email to Alan H., the expert on the Reinhardt Camps: "9:50 pm To my horror the American owner of the big apartment in Queen Anne's Gate, has apparently accepted my scandalously low offer of [...]. Or so it seems. Aaarhgh! He is coming to London tomorrow from North America and we may meet, I am told by the agency. The Big Move will be next week, either up or down, to near Her Majesty or to Chelsea, je nachdem. A Certain Person is criticising me for having 'wasted time' outside that restaurant all last Saturday with you."

Yes, near to the Palace. Back in about 1970, as I drove our children home past Buckingham Palace, I remarked that the Queen was home, as the royal standard was flying. "Does she know how close she lives to No. 81 Duke Street?" asked Josephine, with all the sweet innocence of a seven year old.

September 16, 2005 (Friday)
London (England)

I SEE that the reinsurers around the world expect to fork out 41.5 billion dollars for Hurricane Katrina claims. They are not unhappy, not unhappy at all, to judge by the financial newspaper reports. As they point out, as these hurricancs hot up, to coin a phrase, so they can screw up their premiums to meet them, and they will not lose in the long run. Where would the insurance industry be without major catastrophes?

Hiscox, one of the world's major insurers, has also stated in The Daily Telegraph that Katrina was not unexpected, given that the seas are warming and hurricanes derive their brutal strength from warm water. So if anybody is to play the blame game, it should be the rest of us, wagging a finger at George W Bush and his apocalyptic refusal to sign on to the Kyoto Agreement against global warming.

At present Bush's philosophy on leadership responsibility seems somewhat at odds with Harry S Truman's. The buck stops here, said Harry; oh no, says Bush, it stops way down there -- about a hundred yards from Bourbon Street.

MY friend the militaria expert Bob Johnston rages at me in an email because I will not write an article authenticating the gun that Hitler's niece, Geli Raubal (right), used to kill herself, and he tells me how I have got it all wrong. Maybe I have, but 1931 and guns are not my speciality, I admit.

I reply:

Can I post that letter (edited down a bit) on the website? We've been involved in frantic packing of boxes etc for weeks. We're all moving this weekend, still don't know where to! I'll keep all informed. They filled the rest of this building with hookers, so I've no choice but to go. Mr Sanctimonious Blair's brave new London! All Eastern Europeans and Russians.

IT seems to be open season on me again. Chris Palmer writes "This was taken from the following website below" -- which appear to be by one of our traditional enemies.

DAVID IRVING This man is one of the most outspoken and vile of the revisionists and has several websites. Here's a sample of his beliefs: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?"

It is hard for me to believe that scum like this are allowed to spew their entrails to the world with impunity. People like this must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. If the law does not provide for the protection of innocents, then the law must be changed.

7:45 am I reply, "Yup, I guess I got no taste at all. The quotation is truncated, from September 1991 when I spoke to an audience in Calgary, Alberta; it was used by Mr Richard Rampton QC on the first day of the Lipstadt trial, which I guess is about as far as these dunderheads got into those trial transcripts."

I drive Jessica to school; I have leased a little bright blue mini for a week or two while we move home. The roads are now a-buzz with motorbikes and scooters, beating the £8 a day congestion charge. (As Mayfair residents we get a 90 percent discount). Perhaps our Mayor Ken Livingstone did not anticipate this switch to two wheels, but it is making driving in London a nightmare.

The bikers are hostile and either ignorant of road rules or deliberately abuse them. If they can't get through a gap, they turn and scream abuse, and aim punches and kicks at the cars' bodywork as they hurtle past. What a difference: braving the streets and roads of the great cities of Europe, where rage and violence dominate the highways, not seldom ending in murder; and cruising the wide open spaces of the Eisenhower Interstate system in the USA, where more often than not there is no other vehicle to be seen from horizon to horizon, as one drives (on cheap gas) across Montana or North Dakota or the Great Plains. I know which I prefer.

THE anagram hounds have been howling again. After one expert sent me a wicked slew of anagrams of the name of the otherwise perfect Deborah Lipstadt , e.g., slab throated dip (but only one of which made use of the fact that the crapulous word describing that delightful little country in the Middle East could be found in her name), another perhaps crueler genius has dissected the similarly endowed Simon Wiesenthal, the unselfish owner of the famous name which he rents out for a $50,000 a year concession fee to the Institutes in Los Angeles and elsewhere. He comes up with these offerings:

aimless non-white who instills enema new halitosis men semen within also mean s&^^ lies now he is own ailments lame on this swine now hate in smiles	im the slow insane so new menial s*&^ S*%! low inssane me howl, insist enema S^%$ no male sinew the man swine soil Him sweats online
To cap it all, he offers an anagram of holocaust, "hot coal us", which I must confess I find truly tasteless, to quote Calgary. Alberta, that is, not the Bible.