本书为作者十五年来根据第一手材料研究中国翻译史的心血结晶，也是她告别译学界的最后一部作品，无论在材料、方法、理解及宏观史学各方面，都与中国翻译学现有的作品明显不同。

A bomb, an anarchist's 'accidental death', the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportunism and dishonesty. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state's case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the Historian and the judge.