Def Jam exec Shakir Stewart commits suicide | Music
Music This article is more than 15 years oldDef Jam exec Shakir Stewart commits suicideThis article is more than 15 years oldOne of the most powerful figures in hip-hop famous for signing Beyoncé, died on Saturday from a self-inflicted gunshot woundShakir Stewart, executive vice president of Def Jam and one of the most powerful figures in hip-hop, died this weekend in an apparent suicide. Police reported that the man who signed Beyoncé was found in his bathroom at around 4pm on Saturday, suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I turned up as a snotty kid who looked right: Tom Feltons life after Harry Potter | Stage
‘My whole career is thanks to right place, right time, great mum’: Tom Felton. Photograph: Joseph Sinclair‘My whole career is thanks to right place, right time, great mum’: Tom Felton. Photograph: Joseph SinclairThe ObserverStageInterview‘I turned up as a snotty kid who looked right’: Tom Felton’s life after Harry PotterMichael SegalovTom Felton struck gold when he was cast as Draco Malfoy, the evil schoolboy wizard, in the first Harry Potter film. Twenty years on, he’s still coming to terms with the franchise’s success – but first he’s on the West End stage in a ghost story that’s giving him the jittersTom Felton wants to make it clear that he is embracing his inner meltdown.
John Ward obituary | Ceramics
CeramicsObituaryJohn Ward obituaryPotter whose stoneware exploring fundamental forms had an otherworldly poise
John Ward, who has died aged 84, was one of Britain’s pre-eminent studio potters. In a career that extended over five decades he forged a distinctive body of work, with each vessel unique.
Hand-built using flattened strips of clay, burnished with a pebble and then decorated with a range of matt glazes, from deep brown-black to his perhaps most recognisable black-and-white patterned and green-and-white striped bowls, his stoneware pots represent a continuous evolution of a series of fundamental forms: the bowl, the shouldered pot, the gourd-shaped jar, the disc-shaped vessel.
Miracle find: rare Don Quixote and short stories could sell for 900k | Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes This article is more than 1 year old‘Miracle find’: rare Don Quixote and short stories could sell for €900kThis article is more than 1 year oldSotheby’s describes 17th-century Cervantes editions as a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity for collectors
One day in the early 1930s, a young Bolivian diplomat named Jorge Ortiz Linares walked into the illustrious Maggs Bros bookshop in London to ask if they might have a particularly fine edition of Don Quixote for sale.
Roosters star Mitchell Pearce under fire over video of simulated sex with dog | NRL
NRL This article is more than 7 years oldRoosters star Mitchell Pearce under fire over video of simulated sex with dogThis article is more than 7 years oldVideo of incident shows an intoxicated Pearce trying to kiss a womanPearce appears to simulate sex with a dog and urinate on furnitureNRL star Mitchell Pearce’s career is headed for further trouble after damning video footage of the Sydney Roosters player was aired by the Nine Network’s A Current Affair on Wednesday night, following an incident believed to have occurred at a house party on Australia Day.
Blond ambition: the rise and rise of Johnny Flynn, a man for all seasons
The ObserverJohnny FlynnHe’s already a star of folk music, stage and film, and now the actor is bringing a blond – and nude – Mr Knightley to cinemas in a new take on EmmaBeing a fictional hero was once a more straightforward business. You were handsome, you were honourable and brave: you were in. Colin Firth only had to dampen his white shirt a little to update Jane Austen’s most famous romantic lead, Mr Darcy, in the hit 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Confessions of a cough linctus drinker
Empire of drinksFoodIn Victorian Britain, the opium of the people was not religion, it was simply laudanum
The Guardian’s product and service reviews are independent and are in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. We will earn a commission from the retailer if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. In my early teens I developed an opium habit. At boarding school near Peterborough, as the wind howled in from the Urals, I took great comfort in a big bottle of Gee’s Linctus in the matron’s office, which we were allowed to help ourselves to if we had a cough.
How #gravetok videos of cleaning headstones went viral
The ObserverDeath and dyingAmelia Tait talks to the people painstakingly scrubbing and restoring graves – and posting wildly popular footageThe gravestone in Helensburgh cemetery is in loving memory of someone, but it’s hard to tell exactly who. Exposure to 92 years of Scottish weather has rendered it grimy and grubby, but two small streaks of white at the bottom corner catch Ryan Nott’s attention on a rainy day in May. And so, the next day, the 31-year-old student accommodation manager comes back with a car boot full of equipment.
How to sell a country: the booming business of nation branding | Travel & leisure
Illustration: Lee Martin/Guardian Design TeamThese days, every place in the world wants to market its unique identity – and an industry has sprung up to help put them on the map. By Samanth Subramanian
by Samanth SubramanianLipetsk is already on the map: right there, on page 23 of the Collins World Atlas, a region of 1.2 million people, dead south from Moscow and not far from the border with Ukraine. But it’s not really on the map: it doesn’t feature in the slim mental atlas most of us carry in our heads; no one we know takes holidays there, and it doesn’t appear in our newspapers.
Jean-Gabriel Albicocco | | The Guardian
ObituaryJean-Gabriel AlbicoccoFrench film director, famed for extravagance, ended up penniless in BrazilThe French film director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco has died, aged 65, in Rio de Janeiro, where he was living, forgotten and destitute. It was a tragic end to a career that started so promisingly - by the age of 30 he had made one of the French cinema's greatest successes.
Of Italian ancestry, Albicocco was born in Cannes, the son of the cinematographer Quinto Albicocco.