2006: On 20 February, David Irving is given a three-year jail sentence in a Vienna court after pleading guilty to the charge of Holocaust denial. He acknowledges that millions of Jews died in World War II. The conviction is upheld in September but in December he is freed to serve the final two years on probation.
2005: Arrested in November in the Austria province of Styria under laws against denying the Holocaust. Police acted on a warrant for his arrest issued in 1989 in connection with two speeches he gave in Austria. Bail is refused.
2002: Declared bankrupt at Britain's High Court in the wake of unsuccessful libel action over claims he was a Holocaust denier.
2001: Oxford Union cancels plans for a debate involving Mr Irving after uproar in student community.
2000: Loses libel action against American academic Deborah Lipstadt and publishers Penguin Books, over her 1994 work, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she describes Mr Irving as a "Holocaust denier". He faces ruin over a legal bill of up to £2m.
Jewish leaders later criticise BBC for allowing Mr Irving to appear on BBC2's Newsnight and Radio 4's Today programme after he was branded a "racist and anti-Semitic" by the judge.
Before the verdict, the German authorities had asked for his extradition in relation to 1996 talk. He is accused of racial incitement for denying the Holocaust took place, which under German law is a criminal offence.
1999: One of his four daughters from his first marriage, Josephine Tucker, falls three floors to her death from her central London flat.
1998: Files libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books.
1997: Fails to appear in court in Germany over allegations of racial incitement for denying the Holocaust.
1992: Barred from South Africa, Canada and Australia.
1989: Claims during lectures in Vienna and Leoben that the "gas chambers in Auschwitz never existed".
1984: Arrested in Austria.
1983: Exposes so-called Hitler Diaries published in the German newspaper Der Stern as fakes.
1977: Publishes Hitler's War - a book about the view of World War II "from behind the Fuehrer's desk". It contains the thesis that, until late 1943, Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust and that he never gave the order for the physical destruction of European Jewry.
1968: Successfully sued for libel by Captain J E Broome over The Destruction of Convoy PQ17.
1963: Publishes The Destruction of Dresden, which describes the 1945 air raid on the city as "the worst single massacre in European history".
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