ABSTRACT
Individuals who see themselves or their relatives described in biographies or other historical works can come to the conclusion that their reputations are harmed by the way in which they are portrayed and sue the authors for defamation. If censorship resorts to such extreme measures, the past is literally under deadly attack. Often the censorship apparatus is clumsy or simply imperfect and has its gaps and interstices, and the historians it targets invent techniques to evade it, for example by introducing historical analogies. The structure, logic, and conclusions of the individual chapters are largely self-explanatory, but a few general reading tips should preferably be kept in mind to understand some of the book's core choices. In unexpected ways, the apocalyptic transformations of censorship and its escape routes studied in this book enlighten the nature of history as a craft as much as straightforward censorship studies or studies in the philosophy of history.
