“While this may be a very famous table, this is an awful lot of money for a piece of furniture" (verbatim)

John Huxley.
The man behind the phrase

This recent article in The Telegraph & Argus about the recent events at the Brontë Society quotes John Huxley, Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury Parish Council chairman Councillor saying some very, very silly things:

“The society has become very remote and a little bit metropolitan literati," he warned.
“I don’t have any opinion about what is happening within the society, but it hasn’t been edifying to see it imploding.
“As a council we'd like to be involved in trying to maximise the Brontë legacy in collaboration with the society.
“But on one occasion when we called a meeting to discuss the tourist offering and invited the Brontë Society, they didn't show up."
He said one example of the society’s “remoteness” was its purchase of the Brontë sisters’ writing table, using a grant of £580,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
He said this came at a time when the village had lost its fire station and was facing threats to its Treetops Children Centre and its Butt Lane community centre.
He said: “While this may be a very famous table, this is an awful lot of money for a piece of furniture."

There are so many things wrong with the words of Mr Huxley that it is hard to begin with something. Is this populist-demagogic approach to the role of the Parsonage what is to be expected from a Parish Council Chairman? Is he really so naive to think that the money given by the National Heritage Memorial  Fund could have been used for anything else but buying... National Heritage? And we are trying to remain calm about the 'metropolitan literati' bit as if that could be considered a sort of insult... The metropolitan literati are the reason behind the very existence of the Brontë tourism for God's sake!

Keighley News reports the schedule of the upcoming Haworth Festival (June 18-June 29) which includes a reading performance of The Dissolution of Percy:

Haworth Festival has unveiled a packed roster of entertainment spanning 13 days this month.
The festivities begin on Thursday next week (June 18) and run at several venues until June 29.
Attractions range from nationally-renowned comedian Patrick Monahan to arts and crafts, concerts, storytelling events and an exhibition.
Music ranges from folk, rock, blues and roots to a children’s choir, a ukelele extravaganza and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
Local residents and visitors to the Brontë village can get involved in some of the events, rather than simply watching. (...)
Other events : (...)The Dissolution of Percy, portraying final few years of Branwell Brontë, Cobbles and Clay, June 26, 6pm[.] (David Knights)

The Wall Street Journal asks what will happen when we have AI film directors:

We have to make sure that the androids stay away from comedies. If a wave of AI directors swooped down on Hollywood all at once, we would have hordes of remakes of “Jane Eyre” and “Anna Karenina.” We would have a raft of movies based on sensitive, luminous novels about widows seeking a new start in life in a beguiling Maine hamlet, filled with canny locals who are coarse on the outside but real sweethearts once you get to know them. We would have a million sensitive, heartwarming, intelligent movies about jilted lovers, dashed dreams, the horrors of aging. It would seem like every movie came from France. And every movie would star Tilda Swinton. (Joe Queenan)

Fast Company asks for advice to control stress:

It's unavoidable that at one point or another, we all get stressed out at work. From Franz Kafka finding relief in exercise, Emily Brontë's love of seclusion, and Dwight Eisenhower creating a time management system, we've gathered advice from some of history's most successful people on how to best handle stress so you can be as productive as possible.

Metro lists things women can't do properly (sarcasm included):

Write great novels
Surely the reason that men win more literary prizes than women is simply that women are no good at writing about anything other than shopping and kinky sex.
And besides – there’s a strong argument that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays, so how can we be sure that the Brontë sisters wrote their novels? Perhaps they were all written by their alcoholic brother, Branwell? (Abigail Chandler)

Apparently all Brontë sisters suffered from insomnia according to Bunbury Mail:

If you are someone who lives with insomnia – it's thought to afflict about one in ten of us – you are in esteemed company. Literary history is littered with writers tormented by sleep deprivation, from Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth to the Brontë sisters and Sylvia Plath. (Nick Phillips)

Eric Zorn on things you can do while driving your kids to school as read in Chicago Tribune:

It was mostly just quantity time — accumulated hours together without any particular agenda other than not being tardy. We switched from music to spoken word at some point, and we ultimately listened to the entire "Harry Potter" series, "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Scarlet Letter," "Jane Eyre," "Lord of the Flies" and an assortment of podcasts and less earnest fiction, such as P.G. Wodehouse novels.

Kate Beaton's cartoons are again highlighted in the New York Times:

Drawn & Quarterly: A Starting Syllabus and Creators to Watch (...)
‘Hark! A Vagrant’ (2011) (Kate Beaton) Ms. Beaton’s strips are a heady mix of history, literature and wicked wit. A few titles tell the tale: “Dude Watchin’ With the Brontës,” “Suffragettes in the City,” “WWII Hipster Battalion.” (Dana Jennings)

The Times reviews The Angel and the Cad by Geraldine Roberts:

It dawned on me while reading this mostly excellent book that here we have, in the courtship and marriage of Catherine Tylney Long and William Wellesley Pole, the archetypal plot and theme of every single English novel, from Jane Austen and the Brontës , to Thackeray, Dickens and Bram Stoker, right up to Iris Murdoch, Barbara Cartland, and the Kingsley Amis of Take a Girl Like You: ie, the erotic tussle between a well-shaped virgin and a cold and crafty demon, with money and inheritance flung into the mix. (Roger Lewis)

Thompson on Hollywood remembers Cary Fukunaga's direction of the first season of True Detective:

Cary Fukunaga—who treated the languid, overgrown landscapes of the Louisiana bayou with careful, creepy Gothic romanticism, as in his superb adaptation of "Jane Eyre". (Matt Breenan)

Electronic Urban Report interviews Olivia Cooke about her role in the film Me and Earl and the Dying Girl:

Olivia, what was it like for you to have to do such a dark role? (Marie Moore)
(...)( But it’s more than about the cancer. It’s more about playng a girl who likes herself, a girl who is very self confident. She’s very strong despite her illness and you never really get to read [or see] that. The breakdowns I get from other scripts and casting agents is something like, ‘[she’s] beautiful, but doesn’t know it. She loves Jane Eyre. Boys loves her at school…’

La Información (México) lists novels every 'romantic girl' should read:

Cumbres borrascosas de Emily Brontë. Un amor prohibido entre dos hermanastros, Catherine y Heathcliff. Bajo el escenario de los sombríos páramos de Yorkshire, las pasiones humanas que no respetan fronteras ni parentescos, se desbordan como un mar sin control. Publicada en 1847 la trama nos enreda en un amor gótico y perturbado. (Translation)

El País (Spain) talks about reading and eating, quoting from Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm:

Estoy convencida de que existe una armonía secreta entre los alimentos que consumimos y las lecturas que hacemos: “Le gustaban las novelas victorianas. Era la única clase de novelas que una podía leer mientras se zampaba una manzana”, escribe Stella Gibbons en “La hija de Robert Poste”. ¿A qué se refiere Stella Gibbons? ¿A que si te atragantas con una manzana en el final de “Cumbres borrascosas” existe un riesgo menor de morir en el intento de extraer el trozo de fruta apresado en tu garganta? (María Jesús Espinosa) (Translation)

La Première-Polynésie (France) interviews one of the contenders for Miss Tahiti:

Ton livre préféré, pourquoi ?
« Wuthering Heights » de Emily Brontë. C’est un livre complet qui a pour sujet le caractère destructeur de l’amour. (Ravahere Lopez) (Translation)

Valéria del Cueto writes a story for Diário de Cuiabá (Brazil):

Entendeu tudo interagiu pela primeira vez com um livro. No seu caso, “O Morro dos Ventos Uivantes”, de Emile (sic) Brontë, escolhido, é claro, pela tão ensandecida quanto cronista. (Translation)

The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on the Hotel Cluysenaar in Brussels:

The Hotel Cluysenaar, on Rue Royale, which later became the Astoria Hotel, is more than likely the original model for the Hotel Crécy in Villette.

And Isobel Stirk posts on the Brontë Parsonage Blog about the recent excursion to Plymouth Grove in Manchester, part of the Brontë Society June Weekend.