Norman Stone

Excerpt relevant to Armenians from the Aug 03, 2007 article: "NEW FRONTS IN OLD BATTLES", by Robert Hanks in The Independent

But even in Turkey his talent for making enemies has not deserted him. These days, his main antagonist is what he jovially calls "the dear old Armenian diaspora". In 2004, Stone reviewed unfavourably a book on the subject of the Armenian massacres - "a terrible rubbishy book," he recalls, "the sort of book to be read out in a funny voice" - in The Spectator, and derided it further in The Times Literary Supplement. Since then, he has been a magnet for Armenian anger over what they see as, in effect, Holocaust denial. In fact, Stone has never denied that vast numbers of Armenians were slaughtered during forced deportations from Turkey in 1915; he does not even dispute the possibility that there was genocidal intent. What he does dispute is that there is unequivocal evidence of such intent, and in the absence of a smoking gun, prefers to stick to "massacres".