Yet Martin’s revisionist point is that Vargas Llosa crossed a shorter ideological distance than is often imagined. Beneath the guerrilla chic, Martin finds in Vargas Llosa an old patrician confidence in hierarchy. The “factory defect”, as one university contemporary put it, was congenital: Vargas Llosa never ceased to be a “Lima posh boy”. Vargas Llosa settled in unswinging Cricklewood, which suited a pre-existing taste for suburban conservatism. Vargas Llosa turned up his nose at one and spent the rest of his life gorging himself on the other.