A David Irving announcement

[borjastick]

I got this email message yesterday concerning David Irving's health.

An announcement from his family
News of David
London, July 2026
Dear friends and readers,

For two and a half years these letters have come to you from me rather than from David. In that time, many of you have written to ask after him — kindly, patiently, and sometimes shrewdly, reading between lines I was not yet free to fill in. We have now decided that it is time to explain what has happened and, as far as possible, let David tell it in his own words.

During what was to have been a six-week working visit to the United States in the autumn of 2023, David suffered a stroke. What we have not made public until today is the diagnosis subsequently given to our family by the NHS: vascular dementia.

David is at home, comfortable and in good spirits. He is cared for around the clock and surrounded by those who love him. But he cannot return to his work, and he will not be writing these letters again himself. He would have wanted that put plainly.

In preparing this announcement, I went back through his diaries and correspondence. They show that he had been observing and recording the changes in his health for a decade, long before the final diagnosis brought those changes together.

— — —
During a speaking tour in November 2014, he wrote:

“Good meeting but my brain difficulty, if there is one, is perceptible and I hope no one noticed. I give a poor, disjointed talk, painfully aware when I hesitated. I forgot names and events and generally made a mess of things.”

He cancelled a meeting that month because, as he put it, “the strain on my brain is telling.” Yet by the end of the tour came a reprieve:

“My talk is coherent and good, and the voice defect appears to have receded… Very forgetful. But feeling much better.”

In 2017, after returning from an American tour, he described momentary heaviness while driving, short of a blackout. A late-night ambulance visit followed. A doctor friend warned that he might have suffered a number of small strokes. David remained unconvinced, but recorded the symptoms closely and asked to be referred to a neurological specialist.

In May 2019, after David temporarily forgot that one of his daughters had accompanied him on a trip to Madrid, she urged him to seek a medical assessment. He replied with his own, incomplete conclusion:

“I think we can cross off Alzheimer’s and dementia. My writing is okay, and unaffected — hooray — it is the speaking that is going wonky. My own amateur diagnosis is a partial aphasia, which therapy should help.”

He was wrong about the dementia, but right about the distinction that mattered most to him: he could still write, and he guarded that ability fiercely.

In 2021, when his speaking voice had deteriorated further, he wrote to a longtime friend:

“I may drive up to pick up more stock, Churchill Vol. II, in the next month or so, but cannot speak yet, my voice is impaired. I am using the interval to polish Vol. III, which will be published later this year, God willing.”

“Using the interval” was characteristic. He treated the loss of his speaking voice as a scheduling matter: time reassigned to the book.

The following year, after describing another clinic visit, he wrote the sentence we would ask you to remember above all the others:

“I am editing Vol. III, intensively. I can’t afford to quit now. For any reason. D.V.”

During the summer of 2023, his diary records the ground giving way more quickly. After a fall in the street, dizzy spells and a day of hospital tests, he wrote:

“I was very confused when it was all over, and barely found my way home.”

“My mind is a blur about what the hospital told me…”

The last dated entry in his diary is 22 September 2023. He had spent that final week as he had spent so much of his life: “A relatively productive day editing.” In October he flew to Florida as planned.

During that visit, the friend with whom he was staying told us that David had changed: he was barely eating, was no longer working and often seemed blank. On 24 November he flew home from Orlando. After arriving at Heathrow, he became disoriented and took the wrong airport train. My mother eventually had to contact the police to locate him. He was admitted to hospital soon afterwards.

— — —
The practical arrangements readers rely on will continue. The website, fpp.co.uk, and its archives will remain online; the bookshop will continue to supply his books; and this newsletter will remain in my hands, as it has for the past two and a half years.

And the book will be finished. Churchill’s War, Volume III: The Sundered Dream — the manuscript he was still editing in the final days of his diary — is in the pipeline and in good hands. Our editor, Christina, is checking its footnotes and source citations against the original documents at the National Archives at Kew and elsewhere, so that the finished volume meets the standard David set for it. The hardcover is available to pre-order through the bookshop. The work he felt he could not quit “for any reason” will be completed according to his instructions.

[Archie]

Unfortunate that he got dementia despite remaining engaged in mentally demanding work. The last volume of Churchill's War will be a fitting capstone.

Here's a talk from the time of the first Churchill's War volume. Around 1986 (back in his prime).
https://odysee.com/@ErnstZundelArchive: ... d-Irving:1