17 December 2010

The Guardian Review literary quiz

The Guardian asked 20 writers and authors to come up with three questions each for a devilishly difficult literary quiz.  Here are some sample questions:
In Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, identical copies of which book provide the code Wormold uses to communicate with his bosses in the British secret service?

2010 saw the first publication of a lost essay by one of the most famous ancient doctors. "On the avoidance of pain" was about the loss of his books in a fire in 192 AD and it turned up on a manuscript in a library in Thessaloniki. Who was the author?

In Matthew Arnold's epic poem "Sohrab and Rustum", what was the name of Rustum's horse, who cried real tears when his master's son was slain?

Which composer connects Henry James and George Crabbe?

What is the connection between Willa Cather, the Queen of France and the Emperor Claudius?

Winston Graham, Leon Uris, Arthur La Bern and Victor Canning were the final four novelists to have had what done to their books?

Albert Finney, Vivien Leigh, Claude Chabrol, Hattie Jacques, Philip Roth, Sinead Cusack, Paul McCartney – what do they have in common?

Of the following, who is NOT blonde? a) Sophie in Sophie's Choice; b) Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream; c) Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady; d) Ántonia in My Ántonia; e) Rosedale in The House of Mirth.

Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall are the progenitors of the current Scandinavian crime fiction boom. But what was the title of their first book featuring Swedish detective Martin Beck?

What two means of contraception do Leopold and Molly Bloom use?

How many of the 10 pall bearers at the funeral of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey can you name?

In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, when Marianne Dashwood unexpectedly meets the faithless Mr Willoughby at the ball in London, which of the following utterances does she make? a) "Good God, Willoughby!"; b) "Upon my word, Willoughby!"; c) "In God's name, Willoughby!".
The rest of the questions (about 20 more) are at The Guardian - to whom you may submit your answers before midnight tonight, in order to win a prize.

I didn't do very well on that quiz, but the one I'm eagerly awaiting is the annual Christmas quiz from St. William's College.  According to The Guardian (where the quiz will be published on December 23), "Don't think Google's going to be much help!"

5 comments:

  1. Well, at least one of them is easy:

    "How many of the 10 pall bearers at the funeral of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey can you name?"

    Zero.

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  2. Ah. Same as my score on the quiz as a whole...

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  3. I Googled an answer to one of them: the people in the fifth question are all claimed to be distant relatives of Sarah Jessica Parker.

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  4. And re Thomas Hardy's funeral, the pallbearers were - (Prime Minister) Stanley Baldwin, (Leader of the Opposition ) Ramsay MacDonald, (Government representatives) Sir James Barrie, John Galsworthy, Sir Edmund Gosse, and (from literature) Prof. A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw and (from the colleges where Hardy had an honorary fellowship) AS Ramsay, Dr E.M. Walker.

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  5. The first novel with Martin Beck was Roseanna.

    Now I need to go do other things...

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