World Book Day Quiz - the answers, and the winner ...

Our first round was Mr Harris's first edition covers: most of you easily identified The BFG, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Goldfinch, but the fifth cover proved more of a puzzle.

Suggestions included Brave New World, Norwegian Wood, 1984, and Catch 22, plus The Seven Dials and The Time Tunnel (neither of those bad guesses, based on the design).  But the answer was actually: 

Round 2 featured Mr Hager’s questions about animals in literature. Most of you knew that Rocinante’s rider is Don Quixote, but fewer correctly identified the Byronic hero who rides Mesour. Several Byronic heroes made it into the mix - including Don Juan, Childe Harold and the Corsair, Mr Darcy and, er, Willy Wonka, but the correct answer was Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Bronte, not Byron, but sort of Byron fanfic). 

 Most of you were on safer ground with Moby Dick (a fish, not a mammal - according to Melville, anyway), and knew that what Edgar Allan Poe’s raven ‘quoth’ was ’nevermore’ (not ‘caw’ as one answer not unreasonably suggested). Which animal pursues Shakespeare’s Antigonus off stage? Several of you plumped for a lion, others went for wolves and one suggested a donkey (really??) - but the correct answer, as most of you clearly knew, was a bear. And the penguin in Death and the Penguin is NOT called Pingu (or Adrian. Or Tracey Emin): he’s called Misha.

Mr Kemp’s annual Famous Authors’ Facial Features round did, as predicted, prove something of a chin scratcher. Most recognised were chins 1, 2, 4, 6 and 9 - belonging to Emily Dickinson, Zadie Smith, Agatha Christie, Margaret Atwood and Sally Rooney, respectively. Least recognised were chin number 3, which belonged to P G Wodehouse (perhaps less recognisable without his habitual pipe) - 

and chin number 7, which belonged not to Shakespeare, or Christopher Marlowe, but to John Milton (OP). 

Next to Dr Ruddick’s questions on Fantasy Fiction. Most entrants recognised that ‘This night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining’ comes from Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, although (ironically) not Dr Ruddick’s own tutees. ‘My tutor set have failed me’, she reflected sadly. Durin’s folk are dwarves, and the fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones adapted by Studio Ghibli was, of course, Howl’s Moving Castle. The question that proved hardest was number 4 - which sequence of fantasy books featuring dragons and a school for wizards is set on an archipelago of islands inhabited by predominantly dark-skinned groups? The answer is Ursula le Guin’s brilliant Earthsea Cycle - and if you haven’t read them, hopefully this will nudge you in their direction.

Just follow the map to Earthsea ...

Mr Green’s Sci-Fi questions also drew plenty of excellent, well-informed answers. Almost all of you knew that Judge Dredd patrols Mega City One (we suspected that Dennis the Menace wasn’t an entirely serious answer) and that the ship in alien is the Nostromo, but fewer recognised Cavorite as the invention of H G Wells’s Professor Cavor from First Men in the Moon.

Mark Gatiss as a magnificently moustachioed Professor Cavor, and Rory Kinnear as his friend and fellow space traveller, in BBC4's delightful 2010 adaptation of Wells's novel 

Many of you could name not just one but many of the factions from the Divergent Trilogy (although not the competitor who responded plaintively: ‘these questions are hard’!). Most of you also knew that the still-popular franchise by Pierre ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’ Boulle is Planet of the Apes - although one entrant had the nerve (the nerve!) to query ‘still-popular?' We would refer them to the book blog’s post on five books about apes for an enthusiastic endorsement of the novel - and the franchise’s - enduring appeal.

Do not even THINK of suggesting this franchise is not still popular!

Mr Dormandy’s Great Plays picture round proved to be one of the tougher challenges in this year’s quiz. Almost all of you recognised Picture 2 as A Streetcar Named Desire, and Picture 5 as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Most of you also correctly identified Picture 8 as Angels in America (although Harry Potter and the Cursed Child wasn't a bad guess, given the image). But other snapshots were more challenging. 

Photo 1 drew some enterprising guesses, including Fiddler on the Roof, Les Miserables, and (truly inspired this) Paint Your Wagon, but the answer we wanted was Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.

Some guessed Fiddler on the Roof again for Picture 3 - and also Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Yes, there is the suggestion of a roof in this picture. But it’s the roof Willy Loman is barely managing to keep above his family's head in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

’This has to be something by Samuel Beckett’, speculated one quizzer for Picture 4, and they were right: it is - it’s the entire cast of Waiting for Godot. Not The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or Oliver!. ‘NO idea’ admitted one entrant. They were right too.

We’re not sure that Harold Pinter would have been amused to see Picture 7 identified as The Mousetrap (or The Boys in the Band). One quizzer suggested An Inspector Calls - plausible enough: Sir Ralph Richardson, here on the right, created the role of J B Priestley’s Inspector Goole, back in 1946. But this photo was from much later in Richardson’s career, when he starred opposite Sir John Gielgud in Pinter’s No Man’s Land.

Picture 7 flummoxed almost everyone: it had the highest number of ‘?’ responses in the whole quiz. It wasn’t Fiddler on the Roof (again: you can't just guess that for everything), or The Sound of Music, or The Wizard of Oz, or Macbeth (although that does at least have a banquet in it). It was Top Girls by Caryl Churchill. And on International Women's Day, it pains me to write that you did not know this.  

Mr Gardner’s ‘noms de plume’ round was next: almost all of you knew that Eric Arthur Blair found literary fame as George Orwell, and that Hector Hugh Munro is better known as Saki (although Mr Gardner’s hint that the missing name ‘might be a perfect complement for sashimi’ produced an inevitable ‘soy sauce’). Josef Korzeniowski is better known as Joseph Conrad, and most of you knew that David John Moore Cornwell published his novels as John Le Carré. But only a few of you knew that Francois-Marie Arouet - ‘lottery scamming scourge of Catholicism’ - is better known as Voltaire.

The next set of questions came from the Classics Dept, kicking off with their ‘decipher the names’ roun. Almost everyone knew that Plutarch means ‘wealthy ruler’, Herodotus means ‘gift of Hera’, Gaius Ovidius Naso means ‘nosy, and Cicero means ‘chickpea’, but fewer knew that Homer means ‘hostage’, and only two of you knew that Gaius Julius Caesar means ‘elephant. We didn’t know that either. But apparently Caesar himself insisted, however dubious the etymology. 

Many of you correctly spotted that Diana Rigg was playing Medea - not Cassandra, or Clytemnestra, or Hecuba or Antigone. You were also impressively knowledgeable about classical heroes, recognising that ‘that resourceful man’ was Odysseus, that the poem which opens ‘Arms and the man, I sing’ has Aeneas at its protagonist, and that the wrath Homer beseeches the muse to sing about is the wrath of Achilles (although sci-fi fans everywhere will be delighted that at least one quizzer opted for the wrath of ‘Khan’). 

 The confused Roman poet who hated and loved was Catullus, and you were quite evenly divided about which he did more. Miss Waterfield’s clue is to look at the scansion of 'odi et amo': 'The i of odi is elided so, although Catullus writes that he hates, only half of the word is properly pronounced - od(i) et amo - so his hatred is literally reduced by the appearance of love, and love wins through.' Yay!!!

Miss McLaren was impressed by how much you remembered about literary houses: every single quizzer knew that behind the perfectly round door like a porthole lives Bilbo Baggins, and that Winston Smith lives in Victory Mansions, with its smell of old cabbage and the elevator that never works. Almost all of you recognised Gatsby’s mansion, with its marble swimming pool and thin beard of raw ivy, and more than a handful knew that the house ‘couched like a hind in the bracken’ was Brideshead (as in 'revisited'). But Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Castle - the fictional seat of another aristocratic family, conceived at the same time as Waugh's Brideshead, and a fascinating parallel to his novel - with its Tower of Flints, Great Kitchen and Room of Bright Carvings was clearly less familiar (and, like Earthsea, merits a visit). 

There were some excellent guesses for the final question, the meteorologically challenged, ‘charming but isolated country residence’. Baskerville Hall, Eel Marsh House from The Woman in Black, ‘the island of Dr Moreau’ and Manderley from Rebecca were all good, Gothic guesses, but the correct answer was Muldoon Manor, from Tom Stoppard’s parody of Agatha Christie style detective fiction, The Real Inspector Hound. Not a single, solitary quizzer got this one right. 

In final place came our first ever musical round, compiled by Mrs Waller.  An impressively high number of you knew that Emily Bronte’s pen name was Ellis Bell (look at the initials), and could hear Damon Albarn singing about Animal Farm (although fewer knew that Balzac’s first name was Honore). 

We were more surprised that so few of you got question number 3 right: the track was Paranoid Android, which is (of course) named after Douglas Adams’s famously depressed robot, Marvin (‘brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up that piece of paper ... Oh God, I'm so depressed’). Does this means quizzers are unfamiliar with Radiohead or h2g2? We’re really not sure, but can recommend getting acquainted with both, a.s.a.p., if that’s really the case. It’s good to know that Dire Straits’ story of a lovestruck Romeo, singing a street song serenade, is still familiar to over half of you, that almost all of you knew that Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Dodgson, and that Keats and Yeats were on your side, and Wilde was on Morrissey’s. 

So - it was an epic quiz, and it’s finally time to reveal the winner. There were many highly engaging and creative (but wrong) answers, and if there was a prize for answers that were witty and erudite (but also just plain wrong), it would definitely go to Rio Lucenet.  But there isn’t, so ...

... first prize this year goes to Alex Read (who says there’s nothing to nominative determinism?), with honourable mentions to Nikolas Boyd-Carpenter, and Dr Ruddick’s tutor set (despite their occasional fantasy fiction fail).  

Many thanks to all those of you who participated, and to all the teachers who generously contributed questions (and to Felix Waller for editing the music clips). We hope you enjoyed the quiz, and that it might also have steered you in the direction of some interesting new reading … and if so, then World Book Day’s work is done!