Nicholas William Bethell, 4th Baron Bethell (19 July 1938 – 8 September 2007) was a British politician. He was a historian of Central and Eastern Europe. He was also a translator and human rights activist. He sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative from 1967 to 1999. He served as an appointed member of the European Assembly from 1975 to 1979, and as an elected Member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1994, and from 1999 to 2003. Early life Bethell's parents were William Gladstone Bethell (11 April 1904 – 17 October 1964) and Ann Margaret Frances (née Barlow; 27 September 1919 - 17 August 1996). His father, a stockbroker who served in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, was the third son of John Bethell, a banker and Liberal politician who became 1st Baron Bethell in 1922. His mother was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Barlow. His parents divorced in 1946. His mother subsequently remarried three times. Education Bethell was educated at Harrow. He trained as a Russian interpreter during his National Service from 1956 to 1958, and studied Oriental Languages at Pembroke College, Cambridge, specialising in Arabic and Persian. He graduated in 1962, and befriended Polish students in Cambridge. He resumed his education at Cambridge as a mature student, and earned his PhD in 1987. Political and literary career After he graduated, Bethell worked for the Times Literary Supplement from 1962 to 1964, and was a script editor for the BBC Radio Drama department from 1964 to 1967. The protest of 88 and Index on Censorship Professor emeritus at Georgetown University Peter Reddaway describes in some detail the role of Bethell and his close acquaintance Alexander Dolberg in "sabotaging samizdat". In 1968, for instance, Bethell supplied The Sunday Times with the text of a long, anonymous protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia (published by The Sunday Times on 11 September) which was signed, so he asserted, by "88 of the leading Moscow progressive writers". The BBC and Radio Liberty were offered the same text by Dolberg (under his pen name "David Burg") but, unlike The Sunday Times, did not agree to publicize it. At a time when prominent writers, scientists and public figures throughout the USSR had openly signed letters of protest against the January 1968 trial of Alexander Ginzburg and Yury Galanskov, and eight rights activists had demonstrated on 25 August