The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from "The Destruction of Dresden", a 1963 book by David Irving. In a 1965 letter to "The Guardian", Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but all these figures were shortly found to be inflated: Irving finally published a correction in "The Times" in a 1966 letter to the editor lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation.