The best of Pushkin Press on Venice, the iconic city. Beautifully designed by David Pearson and Clare Skeats and exclusive to Pushkin Press, this box set contains the Venice literature must-reads: the contrasting voices of Paul Morand, Regis Debray, Henry James, Arthur Schnitzler and Petr Kral on the city which leaves no-one indifferent. Contains: Venices by Paul Morand, Loving Venice, by Petr Kral, Against Venice by Regis Debray, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry James, Casanova's Return to Venice by Arthur Schnitzler. EXCLUSIVE TO THIS BOXSET: The first ever translation from Antal Szerb's The Third Tower, the travelogue which gave birth to Journey by Moonlight. Szerb's notes on Venice are translated by award-winning Len Rix. 'I cannot imagine a happier Christmas present for any lover, or loather, of Venice' - Jan Morris 'All lovers of Venice who also love good writing should have the Pushkin Press's In Search of Venice, a handsome boxed set of six books on the city, including Henry James's Letters From the Palazzo Barbaro, a delightful pamphlet by Antal Szerb, as well as Regis Debray's contrarian Against Venice' -John Banville, Wall Street Journal

In this elegant and original book, Regis Debray argues that for two hundred years the defeats of the left have stemmed from its failure to understand what it likes to call the 'national question', while equally its successes have grown from an unacknowledged liaison with the 'unreal reality' of the nation. According to Debray, Charles DE Gaulle was no narrow nationalist. By grounding his actions in a generous philosophy of the nation he was able to wed boldness to insight: on 14 June 1940 he appointed himself leader of the free French, disregarding the overwhelming parliamentary and legal mandate according to Petain. This intuitive action was to be resoundingly vindicated in the resistance and liberation of France. This study of De Gaulle is offered as an indictment of the shallowness of contemporary politics in the West. For Debray, De Gaulle is not only the last statesman in the classic mould, he is also the first to anticipate the politics of the twenty-first century. De Gaulle's aloofness from the media and disdain for the base arts of electioneering have an exemplary quality, Debray believes, reaffirming the vocation of political leadership as something other than adapting to popular preferences or allowing professional communicators and opinion pollsters to set every agenda.

How do we explain the fact that certain ideas, at certain moments in time, can have earthshaking effects? Or that some cultures have left an indelible mark while others have not? Why did Jesus, rather than Mani the Mesopotamian or the Eastern god Mithra, take hold among masses of people? Why did Karl Marx instead of Pierre Proudhon or Auguste Comte leave his mark on the century? Behind these questions lies the matter of the human need to conserve, hand down, and transmit cultural meanings - the study of the means of transmission and of the long evolutionary history of media. In a departure, Regis Debray redefines communication as the inescapable conditioning of civilization's meanings and messages by their technologies of transmission and lays the groundwork for a science of the transmission of cultural forms - in a word, mediology."Transmitting Culture" examines the difference between communication and transmission and argues that ideas and their legacies should be rethought not in terms of "communication" from sender to receiver but of "mediation" by the vectors and messengers of meaning. "Transmitting Culture" stresses the technologies and institutions long overlooked by philosophy and the human sciences in the study of symbols and signs throughout the history of civilizations. Ranging widely from the history of religion and the printing press to the French and industrial revolutions, from the role and place of authority to scientific inquiry, "Transmitting Culture" establishes a new approach to the cultural history of communication.

Regis Debray is one of France's leading intellectuals, whose life has intersected with key moments of the twentieth century. In this explosive memoir, Debray recounts his journey from Louis Althusser and the Parisian lecture theatres, to Cuba and the revolution of the 1960s. From Debray's torture and imprisonment in Bolivia while in search of Che Guevara, to the corridors of power in the Elysee Palace-where he served as advisor to President Mitterrand-Praised Be Our Lords is an account of an extraordinary life and an exploration of the mechanisms of political passion.

The election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide significance. Allende's Popular Unity coalition embraced Socialists and Communists and campaigned on an election programme of unprecedented radicalism - nothing less than the abolition of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in Chile. In this book Regis Debray, recently released from his Bolivian gaol, questions President Allende about his strategy for socialism. These discussions range widely over the history of the workers' movement in Chile, the strength of imperialism in Latin America, the experience of the first months of the Allende government, the role of the Chilean armed forces, Allende's personal background and friendship with Che Guevara, the seizure of land by peasants since the Popular Unity victory, and the international outlook of the new Chile. In an introductory essay Debray furnishes an analysis of Chilean history and politics which situates Allende in the past and present of the country, and explores the dynamics of the class struggle now unfolding there.

In this volume Regis Debray sums up over a decade of his research and writing on the evolution of subjects of communication and the technologically transmitted interventions of the modern intelligentsia in France. Media Manifestos announces the battle-readiness of a new sub-discipline of the sciences humaines: "medialogy." Scion of that semiology of the sixties linked with the names of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco-and affiliated trans-Atlantically to the semiotics of C.S. Pierce and media analyses of Marshall McLuhan ("media is message")-"mediology" is in dialectical revolt against its parent thought-system. Determined not to lapse back into the uncritical empiricism and psychologism with which semiology broke, mediology is just as resolved to dispel the cult or illusion of the signifier as the be-all-and-end-all, slough off the scholasticism of the code, and recover the world-in all its mediatized materiality. In this enterprise its ally is the work of French historians of mentalites, of the hard and evolutionary sciences, and of the technologies of transmission (from stylus and clay to quill and parchment to press and paper to mouse and screen). Written with Debray's customary brio, Media Manifestos is no mere contribution to the vogue of "media studies." It remains steeped in the intellectual culture of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, indebted to the neolithic anthropology of Leroi-Gourhan and the study of science and technology of Serres and Latour, informed by the material histories of the Annales school, yet plugged into the audiovisual culture of today's "videosphere" (as against the printerly "graphosphere" of yesterday, and the scriptorly "logosphere" of the day before that). Debray's work turns a neologism ("mediology") into a tool-kit with which to rethink the whole business of mediation from the city-state to the internet.

Revolution in the Revolution? is a brilliant, pragmatic assessment of the situation in Latin America in the 1960s. First published in 1967, it became a controversial handbook for guerrilla warfare and revolution, read alongside Che's own pamphlets, and remains fully as important as the writings of Guevara. Lucid and compelling, it spares no personage, no institution, and no concept, taking on not only Russian and Chinese strategies but Trotskyism as well. The year it was published, Debray was convicted of having been part of Guevara's guerrilla group and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released in 1970, following an international campaign, which included appeals by Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, General Charles de Gaulle and Pope Paul VI.

Regis Debray's major new work is an exploration of the foundations and limits of political discourse and action. Focusing, with his familiar verve and fluency, on the mechanism through which ideologies mobilize historical subjects, Debray argues that there is a common pattern in all great political or religious movements. Each possesses an apparatus that releases affective charges of belonging and closure; each is tended by bodies of functionaries who maintain its continuity and transmit its doctrines. The great mobilizing ideologies--Christianity, Islam, Marxism--deploy corps of priests, teachers, cadres. The real foundation of "political reason," for Debray, lies in the human need to participate in closed groups, denying or mitigating the harshness of the external world and the fact of death.