Mario Vargas Llosa explains why his politics changed

IT IS not every novelist who sits down to write a serious work of political philosophy. But Mario Vargas Llosa has always been as much a political as a literary animal. He describes “La Llamada de la Tribu” (“The Call of the Tribe”), published in February as its author turned 82, as an account of his own intellectual history. That is a journey from youthful flirtation with communism and existentialism; enthusiasm for and then disenchantment with the Cuban revolution; followed by a conversion to liberalism in the British sense.