Stephen Smith

Aug 28, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Stephen Smith

Tampa mayor reeled in cocaine catch during Keys fishing trip 01:00 A package containing 16 bricks of suspected cocaine was found on a beach in the Florida Keys by tourists, authorities revealed this week, marking yet another discovery of the drug on the state's shores.

Aug 26, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Stephen Smith

Queen Elizabeth II on her 80th birthday. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Observer Like making barrels or thatching roofs, writing about the royal family is one of the traditional craft skills of this country. It involves raking over yellowing newspaper cuttings and polishing old chestnuts about “majesty” and “radiance”. But books about the royals sell, including a recent clutch of glum ones, some ostensibly written by members of the family themselves, so they keep on coming.

Jul 22, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Stephen Smith

A ‘tireless and quixotic pursuit of the mot juste’: SJ Perelman, centre, with Groucho Marx (left) and Kenneth Tynan, in the Observer office in 1964. Photograph: Jane Bown/the Observer What do TS Eliot, the Coen brothers, Dorothy Parker, Mel Brooks, Clive James and Woody Allen have in common? The answer is that they all admired SJ Perelman , the droll New York prose stylist and Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Jun 10, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Stephen Smith

Never a drag: Lynn Barber and David Hockney share a fag break in London in 2008. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer Ernest Hemingway, who knew a lot of artists, said the essential gift for a writer was a bullshit detector, and Lynn Barber’s crackles and wows like a Geiger counter during her adventures in the art world.

Mar 15, 2024 | yahoo.com | Stephen Smith

A British warship has been identified off the Florida coast nearly three centuries after it sank while on patrol in the waters of what is now Dry Tortugas National Park, officials said. HMS Tyger went down with hundreds of sailors on board and the surviving crew were marooned on an uninhabited island for more than two months before making a dramatic escape on makeshift boats.