Robert Smith

The 1870 Education Act provided that every child in England and Wales was to be provided with an opportunity to receive elementary education. This book considers the way in which Welsh society viewed the 1870 Education Act and how local political and religious leaders oversaw its implementation.

This standard lexicon of Syriac has long been the choice of students of Syriac, both for its comprehensiveness and also because of its handy size. It originated as an abridgement of Payne Smith’s Thesaurus Syriacus, a substantically larger work that also tends to be less accessible for the student. Here the meanings of the Syriac words are given in English, and the order of the Syriac is alphabetical, to avoid requiring the student to know the root of the word being looked up. An essential tool for anyone studying or researching Syriac texts or literature and for students of the Semitic languages.The Compendious Syriac Dictionary was first published by Oxford University Press in 1903 and has been out of print for a number of years. A quality Eisenbrauns reprint based on the 1976 printing.

The work of Jacques Derrida can be seen to reinvent most theories. In this book Robert Smith offers both a reading of the philosophy of Derrida and an investigation of current theories of autobiography. Smith argues that for Derrida autobiography is not so much subjective self-revelation as relation to the other, not so much a general condition of thought as a general condition of writing - what Derrida calls the ‘autobiography of the writing’ - which mocks any self-centred finitude of living and dying. In this context, and using literary-critical, philosophical, and psychoanalytical sources, Smith thinks through Derrida’s texts in a new, but distinctly Derridean, way, and finds new perspectives to analyse the work of classical writers including Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, and de Man.