There is also Mario the admirable orator. He has taught a great deal in universities up and down the world, from Berlin to Princeton, but I think most of Mario the superb lecturer who can illuminate so well a theme or a person whom he is introducing, and he can do that in English and Spanish and I expect French also. Once in 1982, he introduced in the Ateneo in Madrid a Spanish edition of my history of the world. It was a tour de force. I asked him for a copy of what he had said. "But Hugh I had no notes," was his answer.

I first met Mario in London in 1970. At that time, although he had published several magnificent novels, he was not widely known outside Peru. He was teaching, I think, in a school in Hampstead. We met at the flat in Gloucester Road of the Cuban exile writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a friend of mine since I went to Cuba in 1961.We were all of us exiles from the Left, for Mario had had an enthusiastic left-wing stage in the Sixties which is not dealt with in A Fish in the Water, though I am sure that it will be in another memoir one day. 

After that, I saw quite a lot of Mario, and he and Hernando de Soto invited me to a conference in Peru in 1982 to discuss the legacy of the Spanish empire De Soto, with his justification of capitalism The Other Path, seemed the hero of the time and Mario was mentioned as a possible minister of culture if he were to win the presidency of Peru at the next election. But Mario began to realise that he himself had very remarkable political gifts and it was he who emerged as the leader of the traditional Peru with a party he founded which seemed to articulate the hopes of the free marketeers. He came to a dinner I gave for Margaret Thatcher to meet writers in 1982.

Mario's eventual presidential campaign was conducted with brio and much courage, though he was ultimately defeated by the more earthy Japanese-Peruvian Alberto Fujimori. But now the supreme winner is Mario. Congratulations!