197 years ago

Today is, first and foremost, Anne Brontë's birthday. She was born 197 years ago and there's no better way of celebrating than by reading her novels and poems. But also remember that there are two recent biographies of her: In Search of Anne Brontë by Nick Holland and just-out-of-the-oven Take Courage by Samantha Ellis. And the classic biography by Winifred Gérin is worth a read too.

Minster FM features the Yorkshire Water campaign in which the Brontë sisters are 'seen' bathing in it. But the campaign now has a promotional video which uses the same image.

The firm’s new campaign includes a video, declaring Yorkshire as the ‘best place on earth’ and that its famous water was bathed in by the Brontë sisters in the nineteenth century and makes the world’s best rhubarb and gravy. It is expected to be viewed by thousands of people on Facebook and Twitter this week.

Tom Hardy himself speaks about his Taboo character on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fred Topel for Rotten Tomatoes: Where did Taboo begin for you? Was it the character of Delaney, the idea of building this family empire or just wanting to do something in the historical period? Tom Hardy: A bit of everything really. I came home to my dad, and I’d just finished playing Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, and I said, “Do you know what would be really good, Dad? To take Bill Sikes and play him as a hero.” He’s a villain, but if he had a noble cause, what a great hero he could be, because he’s just got loads going wrong with him.
How would you mix Bill Sikes and blend him with a Sherlock Holmes type, or someone Ralph Fiennes might play like [Chekov’s] Ivanov, a character which had more gentlemanly or higher class? The amalgamation of the two and then maybe perhaps Marlow from The Heart of Darkness and a bit of Heathcliff [from Wuthering Heights]. We could throw lots of different classical characters in there, a bit of Odysseus.
My father said, “Tom, that’s too many characters to put in one thing.” Then he went away and he wrote a treatment for it, which he set in 1860. That was when the world came of the drama and the characters and the history.

Producer David S. Simon writes about his childhood for The Huffington Post.

We got sick, our local pediatrician/smiling mortician house called on by to both simultaneously diagnose and terrify us (while smoking a long-ashed Lucky Strike), we took our medicine, we sailor-puked some more and then we went to school, sometimes still spotted like someone just did a spit take on our face and we lived our lives fully until we got sick all over again, which frankly, we did so often, that our house could easily have been mistaken for a Charlotte Brontë orphanage bursting with consumption.

Librópatas (Spain) lists the 16 books read by Matilda in Roald Dahl's book, among which is Jane Eyre, of course. The Reader's Room has a Love It or Hate It 'competition' with Jane Eyre. Metro lists the '12 of the best University Challenge contestants of all time' including the memorable one involving Mr Rochester/Inspector Clouseau (number 11). On Twitter, Graham Watson has improvised a Lego version of the Pillar Portrait sans pillar/Branwell while Mandy Powell has also created a Lego version of the dining room at the Parsonage.