of Index). He suggested that a regular publication might be set up in the West "to provide information to world public opinion about the real state of affairs in the USSR". Title, scope and relations with Amnesty International Spender and his colleagues, Stuart Hampshire, David Astor, Edward Crankshaw and founding editor Michael Scammell decided, like Amnesty International, to cast their net wider. They wished to document patterns of censorship in right-wing dictatorships — the military regimes of Latin America and the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal — as well as the Soviet Union and its satellites. Meanwhile, in 1971, Amnesty International began to publish English translations of each new issue of A Chronicle of Current Events, which documented human rights abuses in the USSR and included a regular "Samizdat Update". In a recent interview, Michael Scammell explains the informal division of labour between the two London-based organisations: "When we received human rights material we forwarded it to Amnesty and when Amnesty received a report of censorship they passed it on to us". Originally, as suggested by Scammell, the magazine was to be called Index, a reference to the lists or indices of banned works that are central to the history of censorship: the Roman Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books); the Soviet Union's Censor's Index; and apartheid South Africa's Jacobsens Index of Objectionable Literature. Scammell later admitted that the words "on censorship" were added as an afterthought when it was realised that the reference would not be clear to many readers. "Panicking, we hastily added the words 'on Censorship' as a subtitle", wrote Scammell in the December 1981 issue of the magazine, "and this it has remained ever since, nagging me with its ungrammaticality (Index of Censorship, surely) and a standing apology for the opacity of its title." Describing the organisation's objectives at its inception, Stuart Hampshire said: "the tyrant's concealments of oppression and of absolute cruelty should always be challenged. There should be noise of publicity outside every detention centre and concentration camp and a published record of every tyrannical denial of free expression." The magazine Index on Censorship magazine was founded by Michael Scammell in 1972. It supports free expression, publishing distinguished writers from around the world, exposing suppressed stories, initiating debate, and providing an international record of censorship. The quarterly editions of the magazine usually focus on a country or region or a