Ideas can be compared to fire: just as they illuminate us and light the flame of creation, they can burn us and reduce everything to ashes. Throughout his life, Marcos Aguinis has made ideas the raw material for his prolific work.

Noisy and urgent at times, timeless and almost always with a perennial vocation, his reflections -which have inscribed in their DNA a profound knowledge of the past and a lucid will to project onto the future- have brought light and warmth to several generations of readers.

This book brings together an essential set of his ideas on the most diverse topics: the least happy qualities of our “national being”, the labyrinth in which Latin America finds itself trapped, the new populisms, the fire that devours the Middle East, the seal revolution of Marxism and psychoanalysis in the 19th and 20th centuries, the incarnation of Evil in slavery and Nazism and of Good in the literature of Borges, Kafka, Dumas and the painting of Frederic Remington or the music of Camille Saint Saens.