27 OCTOBER 2007, Page 21

History retouched

Sir: Norman Stone ('What has this "genocide" to do with Congress?', 20 October) raises the red herring of alleged forgeries without mentioning that 'the professor at Princeton' who claimed that the US ambassador's memoirs had been retouched resigned the chair when it was discovered that it had been established by a $750,000 grant from the Turkish government. It is also nonsense to suggest that 'on the whole historians who know the subject and the sources (they are very difficult) do not take the "genocide" line'. It is hard to find a disinterested historian who has taken the trouble to read the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and takes the 'no-genocide line'.

There is a vast amount of unimpeachable evidence, much in James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee's The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916 (2005), which shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the massacres amounted to genocide. Or is this a forgery too?

Philip Stevens London W12