4 The biography is probably most valuable in its account of Borges’s political evolution. A common bit of literary gossip about Borges is that the reason he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Prize was his supposed support for Argentina’s ghastly authoritarian juntas of the 1960s and ’70s. From Williamson, though, we learn that Borges’s politics were actually far more complex and tragic. The child of an old liberal family, and an unabashed leftist in his youth, Borges was one of the first and bravest public opponents of European fascism and the rightist nationalism it spawned in Argentina. What changed him was Perón, whose creepy right-wing populist dictatorship aroused such loathing in Borges that he allied himself with the repressively anti-Perón Revolución Libertadora. Borges’s situation following Perón’s first ouster in 1955 is full of unsettling parallels for American readers. Because Peronism still had great popularity with Argentina’s working poor, the exiled dictator retained enormous political power, and would have won any democratic national election held in the 1950s. This placed believers in liberal democracy (such as J. L. Borges) in the same sort of bind that the United States faced in South Vietnam a few years later—how do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting? In essence, Borges decided that the Argentine masses had been so hoodwinked by Perón and his wife that a return to democracy was possible only after the nation had been cleansed of Peronism. Williamson’s analysis of the slippery slope this decision put Borges on, and his account of the hatchet job that Argentina’s leftists did on Borges’s political reputation in retaliation for his defection (such that by 1967, when the writer came to Harvard to lecture, the students practically expected him to have epaulettes and a riding crop), make for his book’s best chapters.