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“... only touch of reverence provided by candles stuck into empty Fanta bottles. In an introduction, Deborah Smith, the book’s translator, sketches the historical context and suggests reasons for the subject’s particular timeliness at the moment of its composition. After Park Chung-hee, who had ruled the country since 1961, was assassinated by his own ...”

“... An unnamed​ man and woman come together, slowly and arduously, over the course of a novel. She is a poet who has turned mute; he is a language teacher going blind. Her first bout of muteness, which struck when she was a teenager, was cured suddenly in French class by a single word: ‘bibliothèque’. Now she is attending classes in Ancient Greek to see if something in the language can dislodge her mysterious impediment ...”

“... weapon was never discovered, but a ballistics expert testified that it had most likely been a 9mm Smith & Wesson. Maharaj’s gun collection had included a 9mm Smith & Wesson though he claimed it had been stolen from him shortly before the murders. The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the ...”

“... The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won startling numbers of readers in the translations by Deborah Smith, in which the underspecification, repetition and starkness of Korean have been, by Smith’s own account and with Han’s full approval, enhanced by ‘occasional interpolations’ after she listened ‘more ...”

“... a novel that wasn’t accepted by one publisher after the manuscript was first submitted to W.H. Smith, who said that it wouldn’t sell enough. Deborah Levy has recently had a new novel out, good enough to make you want to read it again as soon as you’ve finished it. Numerous mainstream publishers decided not to take it ...”

“... would find things they’d said or written to Malamud tucked into his next novel. Janna Malamud Smith, Malamud’s daughter, said in her memoir My Father Is a Book that she was ‘inclined to think what was damaged by Bertha’s psychosis and despair’ was her father’s ‘ability to live easily, openly, casually in the everyday world’. Anyway, Malamud ...”

“... give you the shooter of that white boy?’ Freedomland, based on the case of a white woman, Susan Smith, who killed her children and blamed a black carjacker, is really a novel about race in America: ‘A black man did it, a black man did it. She knew her product and she knew her customers.’ But the thriller-ness, the cops and the chases, defused ...”

“... a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the ...”

“... it went up to 176,000 a day. When George Floyd was killed at the end of May, sales went up again. Smith & Wesson had its best quarter of all time; gun store owners say they’re having trouble keeping ammunition in stock. The NRA isn’t wrong to take some of the credit: they successfully lobbied governors – and, when lobbying failed, filed lawsuits – to ...”

“... sort of ordeal for the actress and a new challenge for the Beckett estate. A request from Deborah Warner to stage an all-female Waiting for Godot (the intended casting was Fiona Shaw and Maggie Smith) was refused in the early 1990s, and her 1994 production of Footfalls with Shaw came up against the estate’s ...”

“... became her second husband, John McHale, she was largely forgotten in Britain. The sculptor Richard Smith, and McHale himself, suffered similar neglect after leaving the UK.By the time I visited her, Cordell’s memories of the 1950s were patchy. For long stretches we said little. She smoked Carlton 100s and showed me a few collages by McHale that she kept in a ...”

“... Fall. They flicked through my record collection and asked me about the band’s frontman, Mark E. Smith, and his lyrics. ‘What is “mithering”?’ they wanted to know. ‘And what is “cash and carry”?’ Smith, Curtis and Morrissey created a version of Manchester that journalists and photographers began to define ...”

“... and authentic – seems to me more of a period effect. In her book Family Secrets, the historian Deborah Cohen argues that a ‘modern age of confession’ has been emerging in Britain since the 1930s, as attitudes towards divorce, illegitimacy, homosexuality, infidelity and mental distress have changed. Self-narration is now seen as key to psychological ...”

“... deciphered the Japanese Code Purple during the Second World War, along with his wife, Elizebeth Smith, spent almost forty years studying the manuscript. The couple met at Riverbank Laboratories just outside Chicago (a private research facility that housed an acoustic testing laboratory, set up by a textile magnate who was convinced that Francis Bacon had ...”

“... elegies of Mary Darwall and Anna Seward, the sonnet sequences of Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith are only a few examples. The woman poet herself thus becomes a complex character, contemplating her public image with the pleasure of Mary Jones at mid-century: ‘Well, but the joy to see my works in print!/Myself too pictur’d in a mezzo-tint!’ Take ...”