A Shameful Act: the Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taner Akçam (Telegraph)

"In 2005, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk was charged with the criminal offence of "insulting Turkishness" for stating that "a million Armenians were killed in these [Turkish] lands and nobody dares to talk about it".

Last October, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Turkish Nobel prizewinner. But in Turkey the use of the word "genocide" to describe the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the early 20th century is still taboo, and carries a three-year prison sentence.

In his scrupulously researched book on the ethnic cleansing that Theodore Roosevelt described as "the greatest crime" of the First World War, the Turkish-born sociologist and historian Taner Akçam calls on the people of Turkey "to consider the suffering inflicted in their name".