Mario Vargas Llosa, who died on Sunday aged 89, was one of Latin America’s literary giants, says The Times, who had no shame in using his “colourful life” as the basis for his prizewinning fiction. When, aged 19, he eloped with his uncle’s sister-in-law, their ensuing marriage became inspiration for his “comic masterpiece”, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. His debut novel was set in the real life Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima where he’d been dispatched as a teenager by his violent father. He didn’t bother to change the academy’s name, sparking such outrage that the administrators burnt 1,000 copies. A huge admirer of Gustave Flaubert, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, saying that writing could change reality because it “dissipates chaos, beautifies ugliness, eternalises the moment and turns death into a passing spectacle”.

Born in Arequipa, Peru in 1936, Vargas Llosa was known for his “roving eye”. He ditched his first wife for her 16-year-old niece, who happened to be his cousin, later abandoning her – days after a vast party to mark their golden wedding anniversary – for a Filipina model. A communist in his youth, he was never forgiven by the left-wing intelligentsia when, incensed by Fidel Castro’s repression, he moved sharply to the right, railing against corruption in South America. His political shift was sealed at a 1982 dinner party with Isaiah Berlin, Philip Larkin and Margaret Thatcher, whose politics led him to run for Peruvian president in 1990 on a platform of “Andean Thatcherism”. A keen Anglophile, he declared London the world’s “most civilised capital”, but he was loved across Europe. King Juan Carlos of Spain made him the First Marquess of Vargas Llosa, and in 2023 he was invested as the first “immortel” of the Académie Française to never have written in French.

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The rest of today’s newsletter includes:

💸 Why there’s nothing “monstrous” about the rich
👨‍⚖️ Britain’s dodgy judges
🐣 Paddy McNally’s exploding Easter bunny

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