Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured fo… - Clive James

Speer never made the mistake of saying there were no extermination camps. He said he didn't know about them. He impressed the gullible by declaring himself willing to accept responsibility for Nazi crimes even though he was not aware of their full scope. But as the man better informed about the Reich's industrial resources than anybody else including Hitler, Speer was in fact fully aware of the purpose and the extent of the Final Solution and by pretending he was not he did the opposite of accepting responsibility.
Speer cheated the rope, cheated the world, and yet further insulted the shades of innocent millions. Those of us who live by our brains should remember his example, which serves to prove that intellect confers no automatic moral superiority. Otherwise we will meet him again in the Infernal Regions, and be once more confronted with that look of puzzled concern, as if there were something difficult, ponderable, and equivocal about the rights and wrongs of tearing children from their mothers' arms, piling their little shoes in heaps, and pushing their twisted corpses into ovens.

Referring to "the historian David Irving" is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller.

[Mrs Thatcher] started quoting St Francis within minutes of becoming elected, and scarcely an hour had gone by before she was sounding like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.