that year on Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia a few days earlier, the "anonymous protest" was regarded, at the least, as a hoax. Neither its author nor any more than three of its signatories were subsequently identified. One consequence of this debacle was that Michael Scammell rather than Nicholas Bethell was chosen in 1971 to be director of Writers and Scholars International, the new NGO which founded the quarterly Index on Censorship periodical. House of Lords Nicholas Bethell's father died in 1964, and he inherited the barony on the unexpected early death of his cousin Guy Anthony John Bethell, 3rd Baron Bethell on 2 December 1967. He sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative until the House of Lords Act 1999 removed most hereditary peers from the chamber. He was appointed as a Lord in Waiting (a government whip in the House of Lords) in June 1970, after the 1970 general election. Controversy Fluent in Russian and Polish, Bethell often translated the works of Russian and Polish writers into English. After he published a translation in 1968, together with David Burg, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, an article by Auberon Waugh in Private Eye (1971) suggested Bethell had published the work without permission, and had enabled the Soviet authorities to arrest Solzhenitsyn for circulating anti-Soviet propaganda. Bethell brought a libel suit against Private Eye and resigned as a whip in January 1971 to pursue the litigation. (The case was eventually settled out of court.) The controversy denied him a place on Edward Heath's list of Conservative candidates to be appointed to the European Parliament. Heath refused to discuss the matter with him, but government papers released in 2002 under the 30-year rule revealed that Bethell's contacts with people in Communist Russia and Poland were thought to be a security risk. Solzhenitsyn reopened the issue after he was deported from the Soviet Union, claiming that he had not authorised a Slovak dissident, Pavel Licko, to give the manuscript to Bethell, and that Licko was a Soviet agent. Licko's side of the story was given, many years later, in an issue of the Kritika i Kontekst magazine. Bethell rejected these claims, pointing out that Solzhenitsyn had accepted royalties from the publication of the translation over the years. Solzhenitsyn first came to Western attention with the publication in the USSR of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"