Winner of the 20th edition of the Pessoa Prize in 2007, historian Irene Flunser Pimentel has had an extensive career writing about the period of the Estado Novo and its institutions. In the context of her research, she had access to the contents of the Torre do Tombo archives, which contain files relating to the Salazar-era security agency, the ‘PIDE’. The aim of this event was for the author, in the context of a conference or informal conversation, to share her insights into the mechanisms of censorship and repression that were employed during the period of the Estado Novo, including several ‘historical deletions’, the circumstances of which remain poorly understood.