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“... For most people, I suspect, the name of Régis Debray is still inextricably linked with that of Che Guevara. For many, it still conjures up a blissful time of youthful certainties and heroic purpose. Debray was one of the first to do what many later dreamt of doing. In 1961, as a 20-year-old philosophy student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he visited Cuba in the aftermath of the Revolution ...”

“... Regis Debray has led the fullest of lives, embroiled in ideology, controversy and action. As a young man at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he sat at the feet of Louis Althusser; he trained in the use of assault weapons with Fidel Castro; he trod the thankless Bolivian forests with Che Guevara and served nearly four years in jail for his trouble ...”

“... Mauriac, while Lévy had dreamed of being Mitterrand’s André Malraux (unfortunately for him, Régis Debray got there first – just as, Lévy notes in Le Lys et la cendre, he had ‘stolen the part’ of the intellectual as adventurer when he was jailed in Bolivia for joining Che Guevara). More fundamentally, they identify not so much with one ...”

“... Five years ago Régis Debray published an article in Le Monde diplomatique entitled ‘What Is Mediology?’ His aim was to open up a notion he’d introduced in passing twenty years earlier. Neither a science nor a sociology of the media, mediology, Debray explained, is a discipline of the in-between (l’entre-deux): a study of the interactions between technology and culture, between the higher modes of human activity – religion, discursive thought, art – and the lower: transmission, documentation and material production ...”

“... man not only than the Marshal but even than de Gaulle. This is the sort of thing that drives Régis Debray mad. Having received a sinecure from Mitterrand, he has clearly become thoroughly disenchanted with him and has written the one book calculated to enrage Mitterrand beyond all others: a paean of praise to de Gaulle, next to whom, it is ...”

“... in our own countries. Lorrimer Publishing, my firm, would print the trials of Fidel Castro and Régis Debray and a book against the American war in Vietnam. I kept my bargain. My small experience with secret policemen is that they don’t do you in, as long as you refuse to take their money. Marianne did not go into labour on the turbulent journey ...”

“... Anderson, Robin Blackburn and Ralph Schoenman) sent by Bertrand Russell to attend the trial of Régis Debray in Camiri, not far from where a besieged Che Guevara was fighting to escape the Bolivian army. Debray had been captured while attempting to leave the guerrilla encampment and head home. I had also been asked ...”

“... When Feltrinelli went to Bolivia he ‘may just have gone to visit Guevara’s best French friend, Régis Debray, in a Bolivian jail at the time’. (Who is to say? Not Claire Sterling, apparently.) Feltrinelli is the target of a particularly unpleasant kind of sexual mockery. Born with ‘a shrivelled penis ... not for all the Feltrinelli money could he ...”

“... about her country and her past life. The woman who recorded her memories was Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, a Venezuelan writer with links to Cuba, formerly married to Régis Debray, who had taken part in Guevara’s guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967. After ten days with Menchú, Burgos-...”

“... to the barricades on matters of great international or national – sorry, republican – moment. Régis Debray, who sat on Chirac’s commission, and who is strongly in favour of the ban, has argued that religion – what we’d call RE – should be taught in state schools. It is becoming a familiar refrain. The trouble is that if you can’t teach ...”

“... power. In passing, we may also cite the presence in the Elysée of that interesting personality Régis Debray, who was (and may still be) a convinced supporter of Castro and Che Guevara, but who has taken a firmly anti-totalitarian stand on Poland, though it is possible that he was influential in the recent controversial decision to sell arms to the ...”

“... of society as a whole.’ But this marked the end of his early expectations. By then, he knew that Régis Debray had been right: the events in France in 1968 announced a voyage to China which, like Columbus’s, rediscovered America. They were the beginning of the end, which came in Lisbon in 1974. If there was a new beginning, it happened then. Robert ...”

“... younger. I wish you were as you are and also a brute … I wish to understand so much less.’ Régis Debray echoes her annoyance when he writes, in a 1985 introduction to Serge’s notebooks or Carnets: ‘I’d have wished, I won’t say for more heart and less intelligence, but for him to have been a little less the conscience and a little more the ...”

“... not always compatible intellectual spices thrown together: Bella Akhmadulina and Chinua Achebe, Régis Debray and Mulk Raj Anand, President Bok of Harvard and Mr Yuri Zhukov, Chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee, Simone Veil and Germaine Greer. Interesting and able people all ... well, some. But thrown together without preparation and in pompous ...”

“... is not over, but the heady days of the Arab Spring have come to an end. The counter-revolution, Régis Debray once observed, is revolutionised by the revolution. And so it has been. In Syria, protests have degenerated into sectarian warfare, fomented by a thuggish ruling clique that seems ready to bring the entire country down with it. In ...”