David Irving writes:

I KNEW James Rusbridger well and was talking about his odd chosen suicide method only yesterday with a friend. He had seemingly devised an extraordinary Heath-Robinson contraption of planks, ropes and pulleys to strangle himself with, in his own home. I had phoned him a few days earlier, but his phone had been cut off by the phone company (according to the later press reports).

He was famous for a book he had written with
Eric Nave, the Australian cryptographer, about Pearl
Harbor.

John Costello was also a good friend and often visited me in London to show me his latest high-tech gadgets. He lived in Florida, and died in agony from botulism poisoning in mid Atlantic about a British
Airways flight from Heathrow to Miami, having eaten — it was said — a bad oyster meal in Madrid a few days before..

Very sorry to have delayed replying, but I have only just this evening returned to
London from a four or five day militaria camp in Kent, where
I was not only inundated with four inches of rain which turned to slime, mud, and various other oozifications but was also cut off from the outside world more effectively than if I had still been in Vienna. Had to sleep on the ground for four nights; which took me back, uh, fifty years to my boy-scout days.

I am only just tackling the huge e-backlog that has built up.