Happy New Year! I hope that 2022 brings you joy, health and prosperity.
Here are the answers to the Christmas Quiz.
Round One
1. A pangram, that is to say a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet only once. Most perfect pangrams don't make clear grammatical sense. This one does but repeats the letter 'a'. 2. Milquetoast, after Caspar Milquetoast from The Timid Soul by HT Webster.
3. bell hooks.
4. Robinson – they refer respectively to Beatrix Potter's Little Pig Robinson, Patrick Keiller's travelogue Robinson in Space and Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson.
5. Roderick Spode, the leader of the fascist Black Shorts who first appeared in P.G. Wodehouse's The Code of The Woosters.
Round Two
1. Epenthesis.
2. Ekphrasis.
3. Enobarbus.
4. Embers.
5. Ellipsis (The film is If.... directed by Lindsay Anderson).
Round Three
1. Daniel Defoe.
2. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
3. Oscar Wilde who, following his release from Reading Gaol, adopted the alter ego Sebastian Melmoth. Melmoth the Wanderer is a novel of 1820 by the Irish author Charles Maturin.
4. La Nausée or Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. The dedication translates as 'to the beaver' and Sartre's partner was, of course, Simone de Beauvoir.
5. Ern Malley. The journal which published his work was called Angry Penguins.
Round Four
1. Richmond and Kew.
2. Kingston upon Thames.
3. Georgette Heyer.
4. Alfred Lord Tennyson. The poet Walter de la Mere would occupy another house in the same street between 1940 and 1956.
5. Nigel Molesworth. This detail is not Geoffrey Willans's own invention but is included in Simon Brett's radio serial which imagines Molesworth in middle-age. This series is currently being repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra.
Round Five
1. Hopalong Cassidy.
2. Animal Farm by George Orwell.
3. Denise Riley.
4. Guillver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.
5. The Voyage Out, Woolf's first novel, published in 1915.
Round Six
1. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the gift was a butt of sack or Canary wine. From 1984, the gift was a barrel of sherry.
2. A Prairie Oyster. The drink is supposedly so disgusting that it distracts the hungover from their sickness.
3. Lemsip.
4. Anthony Burgess's. The novel is Time for a Tiger, the first volume of the Malayan Trilogy.
5. A posset.
Enjoy the rest of your holiday and all the best for 2022!
EJ
Comments