In his diary, quoted in Guttenplan's book, Irving describes how he once confronted Deborah Lipstadt in Atlanta, where she was giving a talk about the danger of debating Holocaust deniers as though they were legitimate historians.
Both novels contain moments that capture the media circus rather nicely, especially the finely observed spectacle of Michael, desperate for diary quotes, wriggling his way sweatily around the early stages of Marks's party.
He didn't, however, think the song ended properly, and he improvised a coda: "If happy little bluebirds fly / Beyond the rainbow / Why oh why can't I?" "Nothing is more beautiful than a word fitly spoken," Arlen wrote in his diary, quoting Marcus Aurelius.
The next day Figes turned his fire on the TLS after its diary quoted some of the comments from its website, which suggested "that Orlando Figes and orlando-birkbeck are one and the same" and calling on Figes to clear up the matter.
In a typical diary, quoted in the Tigers, he perches on High Spy and actually celebrates the way "two jet aircraft streaked, in a sudden crash of sound, through the jaws of Borrowdale", comparing the RAF's skill to a pair of ravens, spiralling in and out of thermals above Causey Pike.
But some months later he praises the next issue to Lady Rothermere by saying: "There is nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf (neither of which I cared much about myself)." At one point Woolf confides to her diary (quoted in the editorial annotations) the conviction that "There is something hole-and-cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious, elaborate, uneasy, about him".
"I'm just against activists, I'm an old-fashioned Whig," Barbara Castle's Diaries quote him as complaining over lunch.
The personal diaries quoted by Ms Reid, many written by middle-class academics, artists, doctors and their families, offer a relentless drumroll of deaths, often attributed to "dystrophy", not starvation.
He would say, 'Tell her I didn't arrive.' " In his diary, Arlen quotes Montaigne: "For we call a wife good and a marriage happy not because they are but because no one can say the contrary".
