Happy Christmas to all those celebrating!
Here is another very trivial literary quiz to pass the time this holiday.
I have aimed to make the questions roughly comparable in difficulty to those on University Challenge. Re-reading them, I realise that I have unconsciously ended up writing them with Jeremy Paxman's voice in mind.
I will post the answers on December 29th. I hope that you enjoy it.
Round One
1. The phrase 'John G. Vaz MP QC faxed bulky writs' is a near-perfect example of which linguistic phenomenon?
2. The surname of a cartoon-character who featured in two US newspapers from 1924 onwards gave us which eleven-letter word that refers to a 'timid, unassertive, spineless person'?
3. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, which writer and activist adopted a distinctive lower-case rendering of her pen-name, designed to emphasise the importance of her writing over her status as its author?
4. What name connects a little swine, a fictional academic working in Reading and the protagonists of the most famous work by J.D. Wyss?
5. Eulalie Soeurs is a shop specialising in ladies' undergarments owned by which fictional political leader, who first appeared in a novel of 1938?
Round Two
The answers to these questions begin and end with the same pair of letters.
Identify:
1. The practice of inserting an extra phoneme into a word, for example saying 'hampster' for 'hamster'.
2. A piece of rhetorically vivid writing which describes a painting, sculpture or other visual artwork.
3. The Shakespearian character who describes himself as his master's 'considerate stone' but will later condemn himself as a 'master-leaver' and 'fugitive'.
4. The title of a radio play by Samuel Beckett first broadcast by the BBC in 1957. Writing about the production, its author said it 'doesn't come off. My fault, text too difficult.'
5. A punctuation mark signifying the omission of a word or longer section of text, unconventionally rendered as four dots in the title of a cult film of 1968.
Round Three
1. Which English man of letters published pamphlets under the names 'Jonathan Problematick' and 'Count Kidney Face'?
2. Which Gothic work was published in 1845 under the pseudonym 'Quarles'?
3. Which writer took his most famous pseudonym by combining the first name of a Christian martyr – latterly the patron saint of sport – and the name of the protagonist of a Gothic novel who sells his soul to the devil?
4. Which French novel bears the dedication 'au castor', an allusion which, when translated into English, punningly evokes the name of its writer's long-term partner?
5. In 1943, the Australian academics James McAuley and Harold Stewart invented the identity of fictional modernist poet whose 'nonsensical' verse was submitted to and published in an avant garde periodical as part of an elaborate hoax. What was the name of this fictional poet? What was the name of the periodical?
Round Four
1. According to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land 'Highbury bore me' but which two south-west London suburbs 'undid me'?
2. Which south-west London suburb is, according to DH Lawrence's The Rainbow, home to 'well-born, dignified souls who belonged to the metropolis but who loved peace'? It is also the starting-point for the river journey in Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.
3. Which famously private author, noted for her Regency romances, is commemorated by a blue plaque on Woodside in Wimbledon, unveiled by Stephen Fry in 2015?
4. Chapel House on Montpelier Row in Twickenham was briefly home to which Poet Laureate, one of the most quoted writers in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations? His son, Hallam, was born there in 1852.
5. Which Old Custardian lives at 17 Arbutus Avenue in 'the leafy purlieus of Wimbledon'?
Round Five
1. After Jay Gatsby dies, his father shows Nick Carraway a schedule detailing Gatsby's adolescent plans for self-improvement. This schedule is marking a page in which novel of 1904, the first in a series concerning a fictional cowboy?
2. John Self, the protagonist of Martin Amis's Money, is briefly confused by the reference to the 'pop-holes' of a hen-house in the first line of which allegorical novel of 1945?
3. Alluding to Eliot's rejected title for The Waste Land, 'she do the bereaved in different voices' is a line from 'A Part Song', an extended meditation on grief published in 2012 by which poet?
4. After her ordeal in the red room, Jane Eyre requests her maid Bessie to bring her a copy of which satirical novel first published in 1726? Its author claimed that he wrote the book 'to vex the world rather than divert it'.
5. The characters of Clarissa and Richard Dalloway first appear in which novel by Virginia Woolf?
Round Six
1. A barrel of what drink was traditionally presented to the Poet Laureate? The practice was discontinued in 1790 but revived in 1984 when Ted Hughes accepted the role.
2. Consisting of Worcester sauce, raw egg and red pepper which drink alleviates the symptoms of 'the most sinister hangovers' according to Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin?
3. Which over-the-counter medicine did former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion once praise as 'absolutely conducive to poems', adding 'thank heavens its not laudanum or absinthe'?
4. Whose debut novel, the first of a trilogy, takes its name from a slogan used to advertise a brand of Singaporean beer?
5. In John Masefield's The Box of Delights, a local police inspector recommends the restorative powers of a drink consisting of 'a jorum of hot milk' containing 'a hegg', 'a spoonful or treacle' and 'a grating of nutmeg'? What is the drink called?
This quiz is dedicated to the memory of the brilliant Kevin Jackson whose research inspired one of the questions and who, I suspect, would have found the rest of the quiz fairly easy.
Have a very good break and enjoy 2022!
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