SOURCE: Webb, W. L. “An Embarrassment of Tyrannies.” In An Embarrassment of Tyrannies: Twenty-Five Years of Index on Censorship, edited by W. L. Webb and Rose Bell, pp. 17-24. London: Victor Gollancz, 1997.

In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Webb provides a brief history of the journal Index on Censorship and the state of censorship around the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

‘Wake up!’ Solzhenitsyn taunted the Kremlin's geriatrics after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968: ‘Your clocks are slow in relation to our times!’ Index, a child of the better ideals and aspirations of the sixties, was a response to that impatience at the stalling of yet another turning point of history. What moved Stephen Spender and some of his writer and scholar friends was not so much the dramas lately enacted on the political barricades, but the appeals from writers and other intellectuals...