“But I’d never seen corpses which had been in the ground for 80 years.” To deaden worries, he just kept digging. There were other concerns to think about: the shipment of the samples back to England; the pleasure of being the first in the international team to handle the samples back at the laboratory – possibly the first person from the four countries (Norway, England, Canada and the US) to find the genetic footprint of the virus. The Iranian government has taken a serious step, and there is every reason to believe that it has been done with a strong consensus across Iranian opinion. Its boldness lies in the implicit acceptance that moral dialogue may be treated as an exercise in mutual persuasion rather than a display of force. We have one of the worst records in Europe for film censorship, videos are removed from sale at WH Smiths, the police confiscate photographs from the library of the University of Central England, and despite a categorical pledge from Tony Blair in 1996, freedom of information legislation, the other side of the free expression coin, is in danger of being seriously compromised. Disturbingly, the new institutions of Europe seem to be similarly obsessed with obfuscation and secrecy. It is easy enough for us to report the censorship and harassment of writers and journalists in places like Burma, Turkey, Malaysia and Serbia, yet recently, we’ve felt unable to expose to further risk a journalist in Brussels who is writing about corruption in the European Commission.

As a result, the Index published six blank pages.But meanwhile, let us celebrate an extraordinary moment. There tends to be a knee jerk reaction – often in the name of protecting children – towards banning anything that shocks or offends. Within eight days, my hair went grey.”I quote these accounts in some detail because it is not easy to make people in Britain understand why free expression is so important. There is hardly any public debate here about why censorship is dangerous.

My only neighbours were monstrous rats that actually walked on two legs.. I had nightmares every night. “I was marooned in a huge building, locked in all day, drapes drawn, the room dark, dank, airless. I do not wish to justify my actions or make excuses, but the physical and mental pressure I was under shattered and crushed me totally. I wanted to get it over as quickly as possible and do what was to be done so that they could kill me. In Nigeria, another country where, after the death of Sani Abacha at least, there are some grounds for optimism, the journalist Christine Anyanwu, given a 15 year sentence for reporting the news, was released recently.