- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday April 11 2000 16.35 BST
He was still railing against those "traditional enemies of the truth" - Irvingspeak for Jews - who have set out to take "my work, my reputation and my home" from me.
But even without waging his hugely-expensive libel case against Penguin and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, Irving's finances were, in his own words, "on a knife edge".
The Guardian has discovered that he had mortgaged his large Mayfair apartment to the hilt to keep his Real History website - which propagated his views on Holocaust denial - going, and was having trouble keeping up with the service charges on the building.
While Penguin shouldered the brunt of the £2.5m costs of assembling the defence team to nail Irving, members of the Bronfman family, who own the distillers Seagrams, and who are leading figures in the World Jewish Congress, are also believed to have made sizeable contributions to the defence fund.
Irving, on the other hand, claims to have gathered donations from 4,000 "mostly ordinary people in America and Europe".
"Some of them have sent me as little as $2," he claimed, "though a dear old lady in Germany has sent me 500DM notes."
However, Jewish groups claim that most of his cash has come from a network of far-right groups like the neo-Nazi National Alliance in the US and the openly-racist German People's Union (DVU).
Irving denies that he has taken money from neo-Nazis, particularly the DVU with which he was once closely associated. He said his biggest donor was a man from the US who handed him $50,000 in cash in a brown paper bag at Amsterdam airport two years ago. He also claims that within the past month a banker's draft for £10,000 was sent to him from New York.
