Seven years ago, in one of its periodic attempts to co-opt its writers and intellectuals, Turkey offered the novelist Orhan Pamuk the status of "state artist". Mr Pamuk, an independent-minded critic of his country's human rights record and a rich and successful author, found the offer bizarre and turned it down.

Now the state is about tohave its revenge. Next Friday,Mr Pamuk will appear before a court in Istanbul charged with "the public denigration of Turkish identity". The charge arises from an interview he gave to a Swiss newspaper in February in which he said, referring to his country's twentieth-century history: "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and almost nobody but me dares to talk about it."