DAVID IRVING, the Holocaust denier, is planning a new book to try to restore his reputation — on SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

Irving, speaking in a Mayfair coffee shop a week after the moving ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, said: “I am not interested in survivors — survivors lie. People lie when money is involved.”

The disgraced historian, who was bankrupted after being branded a Holocaust denier by a judge in a failed libel action, is now planning the biography of Himmler, who was an architect of the Final Solution.

Irving, who is also writing another book on Winston Churchill, said: “Because of my reputation, a lot of private collectors, particularly in the United States, came forward and gave me access to material which no one else has seen.

“I have read 200 letters written by Himmler to his mistress between 1938 and 1944 which are very revealing.

“I am deliberately holding them back until I am released from my bankruptcy on March 5. Otherwise it would be seized (by the receivers)...they will be a fitting climax of my career.”

Will the Himmler book be positive about the SS leader? “It asks the same interesting questions that I got into trouble for asking about Adolf Hitler,” said Irving.

Irving lost his 2002 libel action against Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic who said in her 1994 book that he had misinterpreted historical evidence to minimise Hitler’s culpability in the Holocaust. Mr Justice Gray ruled that Irving was “an active Holocaust denier, anti-Semitic and racist” who had “distorted historical data to suit his own ideological agenda”.

Canvas support

A MYSTERY woman admirer paid a record £440,000 for a 1990 Michael Noakes oil painting of Baroness Thatcher at the Tory winter ball. The bidder is “an independent free-thinking lady from the Shires, a huge admirer of Baroness Thatcher for all that she stands for and achieved as the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century”. Who are you?

Well, who would you pick?

Good Housekeeping’s poll to find the sexiest women aged from the 30s to 70s named, in ascending order, thirtysomething Kylie Minogue, and fortysomething Elle McPherson, Joanna Lumley, Catherine Deneuve and Honor Blackman

• IS HOLLYWOOD about to cash in on the world’s largest bank robbery, which netted £26 million for the thieves in Northern Ireland? A book, Spectacular!, is being written by Cliff Goodwin, the biographer of the actor Richard Harris. Goodwin, who is being published by Random House, is in talks with the Hollywood producer Justin Stanley. “Crime non-fiction books are the mega-sellers of our time and this is a classic case,” said Goodwin.

  Ps

• Who better to portray Brian Epstein, the first manager of the Beatles, than “Hey” Jude Law? The actor has been reading Epstein’s diaries in preparation for the upcoming film,

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