Mario Vargas Llosa wasn’t always a liberal. From his youth until his early thirties the Peruvian writer, born in 1936, was enthused by the utopian promises of socialism. He joined a communist cell at university, and in the 1950s spent half his salary on a subscription to Les Temps Modernes, the leftist journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
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