The Strange Case of David Irving

History, especially as written by historians in the English tradition, is a literary and idiosyncratic form. Men such as Gibbon and Macaulay and Marx were essayists and polemicists in the grand manner, and when I was at school, one was simply not supposed to be prissy about the fact. We knew that Macaulay wrote to vindicate the Whig school, just as we knew of the prejudices of Carlyle (though there were limits: Nobody ever let us read his "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question," a robustly obscene defense of slavery). Handing me a copy of "What Is History?" by E.H. Carr, my Tory headmaster loftily told me that it was required reading in spite of its "rather obvious Marxist bias." The master of my Oxford college was Christopher Hill, the great chronicler of Cromwell and Milton and Winstanley and the Puritan Revolution. Preeminent in his field, Hill had been a member of the Communist Party and could still be slightly embarrassed by mention of his early book, "Lenin and the Russian Revolution," in which the name of Leon Trotsky was conspicuous by its absence. Moving closer to our own time, we had Sir Arthur Bryant, whose concept of history as a pageant culminated in extreme royalism and a strong sympathy for Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Then there was A.J.P. Taylor, one of the most invigorating lecturers of all time, who believed that the Nazis had more or less been tricked into the war. And how can one forget Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of the definitive narrative of Hitler's final days, who had close connections to British intelligence, who might be overheard making faintly anti-Jewish remarks and later pronounced the forged Hitler diaries genuine? These were men who had been witnesses and participants as well as archivists and chroniclers. Their accounts were essential reading; the allowance for prejudice and inflection was part of the fun of one's bookkeeping.

This of course doesn't license absolute promiscuity. Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party (much later than Hill), may have advertised his allegiances but retained the respect of most critics because he had a strong sense of objectivity in his historical work. In other words, no dirty tricks were to be allowed.

However, what I mean to say for now is that when I first became aware of Irving, I did not feel it necessary to react like a virgin who is suddenly confronted by a man in a filthy raincoat.