Happy birthday Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)! Photograph: Apic/ Getty ImagesHappy birthday Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)! Photograph: Apic/ Getty ImagesChildren's booksChildren's booksCharlotte Brontë's greatest quotes everHappy 200th birthday Charlotte Brontë! Discover her greatest quotes This year marks the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth in Thorton, Yorkshire in 1816. Best known for her much-loved novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte has inspired aspiring writers since it was first published in October 1847. Under the male pseudonym Currer Bell, Charlotte brought us wonderful stories from the heartbreaking and desolate Villette to the bold and courageous Shirley.

Al-Qaida This article is more than 1 year old‘I don’t regret it’: ex-CIA agent who inspired Zero Dark Thirty defends waterboardingThis article is more than 1 year oldIn interview with Reuters Alfreda Scheuer says waterboarding was not torture and insisted such techniques can work In the 2012 Hollywood hit Zero Dark Thirty, a red-haired Central Intelligence Agency analyst played by Jessica Chastain travels to a secret CIA prison and watches a colleague waterboard a screaming al-Qaida suspect, then lock him in a box a little bigger than a mini-fridge, to make him talk.

BooksObituaryLiana BurgessItalian-born translator, she was the second wife and team-mate of Anthony BurgessThe 1966 Who's Who entry of the writer Anthony Burgess listed, under hobbies, "wife". It aroused controversy, not quelled by his explanation that any marriage brings "a private language, a system of codes and signals which would be incomprehensible to outsiders". It was not even that simple. In 1968 the translator Liana Burgess, who has died aged 78, was to become his second wife.

Top 10sFictionNarrative tricks minted in the 19th century are still working in contemporary fiction by authors from Margaret Atwood to Sarah Waters In historical fiction, as in all things, fashions come and go. As we near the end of Hilary Mantel’s glorious Tudor revival, the ancient world is again getting a look in, with writers such as Madeline Miller and Pat Barker refashioning the Homeric epics to glittering effect. But these trends mask more durable patterns, at least from a crudely chronological point of view.

MoviesThirty years on, why was Brian De Palma’s star-studded adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel such a flop? In the opening minutes of the film adaptation of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Bruce Willis’s journalist Peter Fallow arrives in an inebriated state to the launch of his new book. Through a glorious, unbroken tracking shot, Fallow indulges in the excesses of celebrity while being fawned over by the New York socialite and intellectual scene.