Uprising! Hungary 1956: One Nation’s Nightmare is as book by David Irving, described by a UK judge as the leading expert on World War II, examines the spontaneous 1956 uprising of the Hungarians against rule from Moscow – against the faceless, indifferent, incompetent functionaries who had turned their country into a pit of Marxist misery in one short decade: the funkies, Irving calls them, adapting the Hungarian word funkcionariusok.

He traced and questioned the men who had been kidnapped, exiled, imprisoned and put on trial with the prime minister Imre Nagy, who was sentenced to death, and members of Nagy’s family. It is Irving’s assessment of Imre Nagy that will raise eyebrows, together with his discovery among official records of evidence that antisemitism was one of the motors of the popular uprising.

The resulting study is an autopsy of a failed revolution, viewed both from inside the council chambers of the powerful and from street level. This is a compelling drama, with a cast of ten million.

The Guardian: “Irving skilfully combines sources . . . The result is disconcerting, rather like reading a film script, but it works particularly well.”