DAVID IRVING'S reputation as an historian was demolished yesterday when his High Court libel case ended with him branded an anti-Semitic, racist Holocaust denier and pro-Nazi polemicist.

''Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence,'' Mr Justice Gray said at the end of the 32-day hearing. ''For the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews''.

And while the judge said it was not his function to express a view of what happened during the Nazi era, his verdict will set a benchmark for historians of the period and Mr Irving faces a future as an academic pariah.

In her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," Lipstadt accuses Irving of skewing documents and misrepresenting data. The book quotes analysts who describe his work as "closer to theology or mythology than to history." As a British citizen, Irving can take advantage of British libel law, which places much of the burden on Lipstadt to prove her book did not libel the historian. Irving says his lawsuit will prove Lipstadt's book is part of an international Jewish campaign to discredit him.

And Otto Frank once took Irving's publisher to court for what Irving wrote about his [daughter] Anne Frank, the Dutch-Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp.

(on camera): Did you say that the Anne Frank diary was a forgery?

IRVING: Guilty.

GLASS: Is it a forgery?

IRVING: No.