War and politics, East and West, ideology and power, freedom and justice, are some of the themes that we find in this anthology of texts that make up a lucid political reflection on our current affairs and help us to understand the correct meaning of the political vocabulary of our days. Based on the experiences of the classical world as the foundation of the present, until arriving at the current crisis of the so-called democracies, Canfora addresses the problem of truth, the probable and the false, that hides in the facts and in all historical reconstruction. From Pausanias to Demosthenes, from Lenin's testament to the "infamous letter" from Grieco to Antonio Gramsci, we follow a research method that seeks to enter the dynamics of conflict and the struggles that decide the prevalence of a position and luck of people related to it, often in a tragic way. Famous cases of manipulation that changed the course of events and that have helped to write the history of the winners: Lenin against Stalin, Stalin against Trotsky, Gramsci between Mussolini and Stalin, etc.