The two sides in this libel case will face each other in court 37 in the High Court in an action that is expected to last for about three months.
Mr David Irving has questioned whether the Holocaust should be defined as the murder of six million European Jews by the Nazis and argues that Hitler had no knowledge of the extermination of the Jews until 1943. He will represent himself.
Mr Richard Rampton QC, who represented the US food chain McDonalds in its recent libel action in Britain, is leading counsel for Penguin Books and Prof Deborah Lipstadt. Junior counsel for the defence is Mr Anthony Julius of Mishcon de Reya. Mr Julius was Princess Diana's solicitor during her divorce and has written a book on the poet T. S. Eliot's anti-Semitism.
Both sides have agreed that due to the volume of documentation and the detail of the issues, the case should be held without a jury. It will be argued in front of Judge Charles Gray, who will be sitting alone. Judge Gray represented the disgraced former Conservative minister, Mr Jonathan Aitken, in his failed libel action against the Guardian and Granada Television.
Penguin Books and Dr Lipstadt vigorously deny libel, and the publisher insists on the author's right to free speech. Dr Lipstadt's book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, was published in 1995 and grew from her fears about the spread of revisionist historical theories in the US which said the Holocaust was invented by the Jews.
She accused Mr Irving of being a key exponent of Holocaust denial throughout the world. As a denier with access to historical records and a high public profile, Mr Irving distorted history in order to cast Hitler in a positive light, denied the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and consorted with other deniers to promote their message, Dr Lipstadt said.
Attention will inevitably focus on Mr Irving's revisionist views of the second World War, which he has promoted in more than 20 books. Mr Irving has said Dr Lipstadt's legal team will regret it if they try to fight the second world war all over again in court.
The historian's controversial claims about Hitler's true intentions, contained in his 1977 book Hitler's War, include his assertion that there is "incontrovertible evidence" that Hitler did not order the liquidation of the Jews.