Thanks to this excellent bottom-up study of the Portuguese PIDE, we can better understand how neither the political police forces of dictatorships are as distant and distinct from the societies they monitor and repress as we think, nor are societies as innocent or terrified as we sometimes like to believe.

Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, Professor Department of History, Trent University, Canada

The Portuguese political police under the authoritarian Estado Novo were a force of repression and terror for many – but also a useful resource for many others. In the best tradition of the everyday life history approach, Duncan Simpson impressively demonstrates the complexities of such local realities in postwar Portugal. Salazar's PIDE and Portuguese Society offers groundbreaking analysis to shed light on those who saw the forces of repression as something normal to live with, or even as something tremendously useful for their own goals.

Alexander Keese, Professor, University of Geneva, Switzerland