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An intellectual autobiography of the Nobel Prize winner in literature. A liberal thinker's mapping of the development of ideologies in the twentieth century, from the perspective that comes from standing on the shoulders of giants. The author analyses his own ideological evolution and the fundamental works of prominent scholars who helped him develop a new body of ideas after a major ideological trauma - his disappointment with the Cuban Revolution (and a trip to the USSR in the 1960s, where he saw need and injustice), and thus his departure from the ideas of Sartre, who had inspired him in his youth. "If you wanted to call yourself an intellectual in the 60s and later, you had to be a Marxist, otherwise you were subjected to crushing obstruction," he said, and as a verdict: "Marxism is not an ideology, it is a religion for Western intellectuals. The transformation of Llosa's worldview is marked by seven great thinkers with whom he engages in a frank dialogue. Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel - these giants showed him a tradition of thinking that privileges the individual over the tribe, nation, or party, and that upholds freedom of speech as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. There is very little similar literature in the world, and the causes and consequences of ideological influences on civilisation and human thinking can only be traced from a distance and from a long time distance.