This event is a book launch for Eric Rouleau's autobiographical work titled Truths and Lies in the Middle East: Memoirs of a Veteran Journalist, 1952-2012. Eric Rouleau was one of the most celebrated journalists of his generation, a status he owed to his extraordinary career, which began when Hubert Beuve-Méry, director of Le Monde, charged him with covering the Near and Middle East.

Alain Gresh, French journalist and former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, who also wrote the foreword for this book will be speaking at this event about Rouleau's life and work. The event will be chaired by Jim Muir, Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre and BBC Middle East Correspondent.

Writing between Cairo and Jerusalem, Rouleau was a chief witness to the wars of 1967 and 1973, narrating their events from behind the scenes. He was to meet all the major players, including Nasser, Levi Ashkol, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, and Anwar Sadat, painting striking portraits of each. More than a memoir, his book presents a history, lived from the inside, of the Israel–Palestine conflict. In 1963, Rouleau was invited by Gamal Abd al-Nasser to interview him in Cairo, a move which was not lost on the young Rouleau—going through him, a young Egyptian Jew who had been exiled from Egypt in late 1951, shortly before the Free Officers coup, was a means to renew diplomatic ties with de Gaulle’s France. This exclusive interview, which immediately made headlines around the world, propelled Rouleau into the center of the region’s conflicts for two decades.

Alain Gresh is Publication Director of the online newspaper Orient XXI. He was previously Deputy Director of Le Monde Diplomatique from 2008-2013. A specialist on the Middle East, he is author of several books including PLO: The Struggle Within, de quoi la palestine est elle le nom? and  Un chant d’amour. Israël-Palestine, une histoire française. In 1983, Gresh completed a PhD on the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

Jim Muir is a British journalist and BBC Middle East Correspondent. After taking a first in Arabic at Cambridge University in 1969, Jim worked in book publishing in London in the early 70s and moved to Beirut in January 1975. He covered all phases of the Lebanese Civil War 1975–1990 for the BBC and many other radio and print outlets. He then moved to Bosnia in the early 1990s before arriving in Cairo as BBC Middle East correspondent in 1995. Jim then reopened the BBC Tehran bureau and was correspondent there from 1999 to 2004. In 2005, he returned to Beirut and spent much time covering Iraq for the BBC, followed by the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt in 2011. Jim also provided a large proportion of the BBC's coverage of the Syrian uprising and civil war from the spring of 2011.

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