World Book Day Quiz - the answers ...

In the last post of this term, we're bringing you the answers to this year's World Book Day Quiz - and (even more importantly) announcing the winners ...

In Round One, Mr Harris wondered whether you could identify five books by their covers. By and large, it turned out that you could.  The first cover - 

belonged to Mario Puzo's The Godfather: 

Most of you knew this, although Noughts and Crosses was a popular alternative, plus titles along the lines of 'Pinocchio', 'Muppets or Puppets?' and (sigh) 'The Installation of the Ceiling Mounted Fan'. It's a visual metaphor, people. 

The second cover 

belonged to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

Almost everyone knew this, although at least two of you opted for 'Squid Game', with the occasional 'Red Riding Hood' thrown into the mix.  Cover number 3 was much trickier:

It's A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams:

Only 10 people got this right (tho, to be fair, students of A Level English had a bit of an advantage, as it's one of this year's set texts).  Alternatives included The Female Eunuch, 'Dancing with Myself', 'The Cutlery Gang' and 'Spaghetti Men' - all of them weirdly plausible. Book number 4:

was The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick:

And most of you correctly identified it. Even the wrong answers were in the right sort of area (eg Robert Harris's Fatherland) and the flags and the tagline were helpful clues: 'Comprehensive History of WW2?' suggested one quizzer hopefully. 

Mr Harris saved his most challenging book to the end, and cover number 5 duly foxed pretty much everybody. 

Yes, it looks like 'Mario and Pikachu'.  But it's not.  It's A Confederacy of Dunces, the posthumously published, Pulitzer prize winning satire by John Kennedy Toole. 

The cover star is the novel's hero, Ignatius J Reilly, famous enough to have his statue in New Orleans, where the novel is set - 

- but clearly unfamiliar to Pauline readers, because only three of you recognised him. 'Attacking Birds', 'The Man Screamed Duck' and 'Chubby Man and His Chubby Parrot' - you weren't trying very hard, were you? 

Round Two featured questions on sci-fi and fantasy literature, kindly contributed by Mr Green and Dr McDonnell. And this is clearly a genre that many of you know an immense amount about. Almost everyone correctly identified the 1980s graphic novel that popularised the Guy Fawkes mask now worn by a variety of protesters worldwide as V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore. Money Heist was the most common alternative (fair enough), but it was Moore's original we were looking for.  

The record-breaking sci-fi film apparently part inspired by Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is not Star Wars, or Dune, or 2001, but Avatar (as only 16 of you knew).  She wasn't very happy about it either, writing in 2017 that 'a high-budget, highly successful film resembled the novel in so many ways that people have often assumed I had some part in it. Since the film completely reverses the book's moral premise, presenting the central and unsolved problem of the book, mass violence, as a solution, I'm glad I had nothing at all to do with it.'  Which seems perfectly reasonable, under the circumstances.  

Ursula Le Guin. Not James Cameron. 

Almost everyone remembered that the person whose home you reach by following 'Second Star to the Right and Straight on 'Til Morning' was Peter Pan - not 'mine', 'Jesus', or 'Clapham'. And the next question scored 100% accuracy across the board: of course you all knew that 'Quadball' was previously known as Quidditch. Award yourself house points (and Harry-bos) all round.  

Having lulled you into a sense of false security with such a simple question, Mr Green and Dr McDonnell went straight for the jugular with their final anagrams round: some of them simple - some of them frankly baffling.

The first and last were the easiest. Most of you spotted that HUG GENE HAMSTER: I FIGHT CANCER (2009) is better known as Hunger Games Catching Fire - 'I heard someone say this one', fessed up a particularly honest Pauline - and FUN IN HETEROGENEITY (1949) was easily recognised as Nineteen Eighty Four. 

But the others were tough. Only 15 of you correctly translated NOVELIST EATEN (2014) as Station Eleven. Some students fought anagram with anagram, offering 'Teen Stavilost', and 'Netea Tsilevon' (which certainly sound like scifi), but others were more honest: 'Dunno'. LETHAL TWILIGHT FIGHTERS (2014) was an almost universal fail (perhaps because the anagram conjures up such a vivid image it's hard to think of anything else). Only six of you figured out that this was The Girl With All The Gifts. 

HELP HERE TAPIR (2014) ('Ugh') was, of course, The Peripheral, and CHROMED ELF INN was Children of Men. Not 'Elf, innit' or 'IRobot'. 

In Round Three, Mr Dormandy tested your knowledge of theatre slang, and it turns out that many of you speak thesp fairly fluently.  

60% of you knew that when a theatre is 'dark', there's no production on. 49% knew that a 'walking asm' is a stage manager who also acts (and not an Irish ghost). 46% of you knew that a 'corpse' is an unscripted laugh, although a surprising 24% thought it was a heavy weight (presumably because a corpse is what you would be if it landed on you). But hardly anyone knew that 'slap' is make-up, and only 32% of you were aware that a 'dry' is when an actor forgets their lines. 26% knew that the 'strike' means taking down the set,  and a meagre 12 of you knew 'the green' is onstage.   

And talking of green, it's on to Round Four, and the questions kindly donated by Miss Muir and EcoSoc.  We were impressed that more than half of you could identify the African river on which Conrad's Heart of Darkness is set. The 'mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land' is, of course, the Congo, where Conrad served as captain of a Belgian trading ship during the early 1890s.  

Design by Emma Howitt

However, as Mrs Cummings rightly pointed out, the river is never actually named in the novel. Which might be why some of you suggested the Nile, the Amazon and the Zambezi instead.  

The 'wuthering’ of Wuthering Heights means 'strong winds', as 41% correctly knew (or guessed): 'dark, brooding skies', fit for dark, brooding heroes, came a close second on 36%. The next question asked you to identify the author of the following lines: 

‘In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.’

We had a wide range of suggestions, but most of them were wrong, including 'John Keanes', John Milton (OP), Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, William Blake or William Shakespeare. The correct answer was William Wordsworth (not 'William Wordle), in 'Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey'. Only seven of you knew this.

Exactly the same number (but not exactly the same people) knew that the American poet who wrote about wild geese was Mary Oliver. Not William Blake (fascinated by America, but not actually American), Philip Larkin/Ted Hughes (some quizzers tried these two for everything), Margaret Atwood (keen ecologist and life-long birdwatcher, but she's Canadian) and - perhaps inevitably - 'Ryan Gosling'. 

Ryan Gosling. Not Mary Oliver. 

The next question was a picture question:

We were impressed that eight of you recognised not just the play (King Lear), but the scene: 'when the fool and the King are in the rain and storm and Mr Anthony's bin bags are being lit up.'  At least a couple of you also got the lines right, although some of the suggestions - 'I should've worn a coat' - were less than Shakespearean.  And no, the man with the beard is not 'Zeusain Bolt'... 

Usain Bolt. Not King Lear.

The cli-fi (climate fiction) novel involving mother and daughter escaping a pollution-ridden city to live in a nature state, shortlisted for a Booker Prize in 2020, was Diane Cook's The New Wilderness: only six of you got this. But you perked up a bit with the next question: in which epic poem would you find the ‘selva oscura’? 31% knew this was Dante's Divine Comedy (we also accepted Dante's Inferno) and the rest of you chucked epic poems around with gay abandon: The Aeneid, The Odyssey, Beowulf, 'Kubla Khan', as well as the surprisingly plausible-sounding The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and 'Unseen Poems from the 23rd Century'. You're way ahead of us there …

Few of you could identify the quotation from Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (not without help from their tutor, anyway), and the echo in the Marabar cave, 'which quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. “Boum” is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or “bou-oum,” or “ou-boum” – bewildered most people completely: 'sounds like Terry Pratchett, or something equally weird.'  Other suggestions included Our Man in Havana and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, but it was actually E M Forster's A Passage to India (and an impressive nine of you knew this).

Terry Pratchett. Not E M Forster.

Most of you could identify ‘When in April the sweet showers fall/And pierce the drought of March to the root ... (etc) as 'one of the tales from that thing'. It was indeed Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (and as we gave you the Ted Hughes translation, we accepted that as well).  And although several of you thought that 

‘Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest' 

came from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (and we can see why), a respectable 27 quizzers remembered where they'd heard The Call of the Wild before, and correctly identified author Jack London.  The next extract: 

‘It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.’

didn't come from 'An Arsonist's Pocket Guide' or 'Nero's Autobiography',  but from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: and a remarkable 63% of you knew this.

Round Five was Mr Kemp's 'which came first' round, a literary/chronological time machine tour. We were relieved that 78% of you knew Gilgamesh and Enkidu predated Normal People's Connell and Marianne, and that only marginally fewer (75%) knew Austen's Pride and Prejudice came before Eliot's Middlemarch.

Scythe/The Hunger Games was much closer - a narrow victory for Suzanne Collins (52/48) - but Paradise Lost/Lycidas was a dead heat: 50/50 either way. It's actually Lycidas that came first: Milton published it in 1637, as part of a collection of elegies commemorating his friend and fellow student Edward King, who had drowned on a voyage to visit his family in Ireland.  Paradise Lost - 'of long choosing and beginning late', as Milton puts it in the opening of Book IX - wasn't published until 30 years later, although to be fair, he'd been planning it as early as 1640. They also serve, who only stand and wait ... and wait ... and wait ...

The first edition of Paradise Lost (1667)

The remaining three tussles were confident victories for most quizzers. 65% of you knew that Nicholas Nickleby pre-dates David Copperfield; 67% of you knew that Hughes's Hawk (1957) came before Plath's Ariel, and more than half of you knew A Little Life preceded To Paradise (which also makes spiritual sense).  

Which takes us to the far from paradisial Round Seven - Famous Literary Moustaches: could you identify which writer's lips sported each spectacular tache? Er, no. Basically, you couldn't. 

For instance, you thought moustache number one could have belonged to lots of people - some of them even writers: Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Poirot and finally 'French' ...

But it was actually John Donne, and - as a man who had his portrait painted several times - we think he'd have been slightly miffed that only three of you recognised him.

Moustache number two was slightly easier (especially if you've ever had a lesson in E6, where you can see it on a poster).  

It's not 'James 1st' or even 'Louis XIV'. It's Byron, back from his Grand Tour of Europe in 1813 with a fabulous Albanian costume ('the most magnificent in the world', he declared) and a natty little moustache. 

A respectable (at least in the context of this round) eight of you knew this.

The wispy, barely there goatee of picture number three - 

- produced loads of intriguing suggestions, including Jesus, Machiavelli, 'Shakespeare's brother?' - with author John Green and AEW's Alex Reynolds probably the best matches:

But it's actually Christopher Marlowe, from a portrait owned by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and formerly hung in the student hall (where undergrads reputedly chucked sprouts at it in the 19th century: ah, student life ...).   

Moustache number four puzzled most of you - 

- but also drew some inspired suggestions: Einstein, Stalin, Camus (it's the cigarette, presumably?), Heisenberg from Breaking Bad and (our favourite) Arthur Shelby:

Arthur Shelby (Paul Anderson), looking even more bewildered than usual

But it was Kurt Vonnegut, with his moustache in a reasonably restrained phase.  

Moustache number five was probably the easiest: 

A mighty 27 of you (again, it's relative) correctly identified William Shakespeare 

although Charles Darwin, Blackadder, Francis Drake, 'Français Drake' and Michael Rosen were also in there somewhere.  

Quizzers came up with a frenzy of ideas for moustache number six - some of them even sensible.  

Kafka, Guy Fawkes, Dickens, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D H Lawrence, Woodrow Wilson, 'Wright Brother', 'Charlie's chaplin' ... Most convincing candidates, in the blog's view, were Howard Stark (Ironman's dad) and Nikola Tesla: 

But it was Robert Louis Stevenson. 

And only one quizzer recognised him (Paulines - your parents are a very knowledgeable bunch).  

Moustache number six - 

- was slightly more straightforward - 

Yes, it's George Orwell, and we're not sure he'd have found your comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, General Kitchener and Walt Disney particularly flattering ... 

The final tache - 

- produced some intriguing and quite credible suggestions, including Zeus, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Mufasa from the Lion King and Benoit Blanc. Two strong contenders were Dracule Mihawk, from anime series One Piece and Pixar's eponymous Megamind:

And yes, there's a definite resemblance.  But the owner of our final foxy goatee is Ezra Pound - 

- seen here in an early portrait by Wyndham Lewis - now lost or (who knows) captured by an alien super-villain ...

Our penultimate round focussed on animals in literature. In which writer's plays can you find tortoises named Pat, Plautus and Lightning? 

Not Shakespeare, Shaw, Phineas and Ferb or Roald Dahl (not a bad idea, thinking of Esio Trot). Definitely not Samuel Beckett.  No - it's Tom Stoppard - as a brainy handful of you knew. Pat gets accidentally trodden on when George tries to disprove Zeno's paradox in Jumpers (also killing his pet hare Thumper in the process), and Plautus and Lightning feature in Arcadia's parallel time-schemes.

 

Simon Russell Beale as George, in Jumpers: about to kill two of his pets ...

The writer whose pets included a crocodile, a bear, and a dog named Boatswain wasn't Ernest Hemingway - although we're fairly sure he'd have been up for it. Nor was it Oscar Wilde or Hugh 'Doctor Doolittle' Lofting. It was Byron (making his second appearance this year).  Boatswain is commemorated not just in a very grand tomb at Newstead Abbey, complete with elegaic inscription by his youthful owner, but also in a hand-drawn comic strip by Byron's friend and neighbour Elizabeth Pigot, The Wonderful Adventures of Lord Byron and his Dog:

Byron holding cricket bat and in hot bath; Boatswain bringing him a dead rat (Elizabeth Pigot)

Another much-loved boyhood pet is Christopher's rat Toby, in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. Toby is so much-loved that Christopher almost gets killed trying to rescue him when he escapes onto the tube tracks of the London underground.  Definitely dangerous - but not quite as bizarre as some of your suggestions which included 'falling out of a tree', 'drops an air conditioning unit on his head' and the enigmatic 'magical'.

George and Eileen Orwell named their pet dog after a political writer - but which one? You had lots of ideas here, including Engels, Marat, Nietzsche, Hamilton and 'Hugo Nilsson' but the correct answer was 'Marx'. Apparently the Orwells hadn't yet read Marx when they christened their new pet: once they had, Eileen Orwell confessed to a friend, they could no longer look the poor dog in the face.

 
We were impressed by how many of you were aware that Patricia Highsmith kept snails as pets, stashed not only in her handbag but in all sorts of less conventional places (you really don't want to know). Mice and ferrets were popular, and appropriately sized, suggestions.

Patricia Highsmith: we're sure there are snails in that apartment somewhere ...

For the question 'who or what is Richard Parker?', there were a range of good answers. 'It's the life of pi thing', said one quizzer, relieved. Yes, it is - but it's so much more ... Several of you quite correctly pointed out that as well as being a tiger (SPOILER ALERT: or is he?), Richard Parker is also Peter Parker's father. In a round of questions about animals in literature, 'Spiderman's dad' was definitely an answer we were happy to accept.

 
Then we reached our googlewhack question: 'which 20th century literary villain has a monkey as a pet? The unfortunate creature has its tail severed when a plot by a pair of twins to murder its owner goes horribly wrong.' You tried hard - Moriarty, Jafar, Captain Hook, Mr and Mrs Twit, 'the bad toys from Toy Story' - but let's face it, you had NO idea.  

It's Steerpike (sketched here - centre - by the author), the murderous antagonist of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy, published in the same year as Brideshead Revisited, and similarly charting the decline of a noble family and their ancestral home in parallel with the rise to power of a low-born outsider. Haven't read it? You definitely should.  

With the penultimate animal question, we should probably give you the answers first. But - however appropriate that might be - we won't: 'if you were playing Literary Jeopardy, and the answer was 'an orangutan', what would be the question?

Your responses to this one were brilliant.  Laying aside obvious witticisms (such as 'name a primate' and 'who is Donald Trump?') we were dazzled by the range of replies: who knew there were so many possible answers? Well, you did. Obviously. 

Literary orangutans include Orange Juice (from Life of Pi, again), King Louis from Disney's version of Kipling's Jungle Book, the librarian from Terry Pratchett's Unseen University (brilliant suggestion from - of course! - Mrs Cummings) and [spoiler alert] the killer from Edgar Allan Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue'.  Many, many points all round.

Our final question asked which author owned the cat commemorated in this London statue?  

Several of you thought it might be George Orwell, who definitely had a dog - we've already covered that - and also a goat named Muriel, but not, as far as we know, a cat. Others suggested Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, and T S Eliot (who adored cats, real and Jellicle), but the most popular suggestion, with 17 votes, was Samuel Pepys (OP). Unfortunately, it was wrong.  

Pepys did have a pet cat, recording in his diary the night in November 1667 when he and his wife were woken up by it bounding down the stairs (they thought it was a ghost). He even briefly kept a lion cub in his office at the Admiralty (it was a present from a colleague in Algeria), until it got too big and had to be despatched to the Tower of London Menagerie. But the cat on the plinth here is Hodge - 'a very fine cat indeed', according to his owner, who was - as five of you knew - Samuel Johnson. 

And so we move to our final round: Mr Gardner's Shakespearean Cryptic Crossword.  If you got this far, you earned our respect - such stamina! - and generally picked up a healthy number of points. 

The clues all pointed to characters from Shakespeare - all but the first (which was a tad sneaky).  Across (2, 12): Disapproving way to accept drink leads to eternal damnation (8, 4) wasn't a person at all, but a piece of advice.  'Leads to eternal damnation' is the definer: combine 'prim' (disapproving), plus 'path' (way) with the addition ('accepts') of a type of drink - here, 'rosé' wine (without the accent)  - and you've got the  'primrose path' with which Ophelia teases Laertes, when he lectures her on how she should behave while he's off gallivanting in France: 

'But, good my brother,

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puff' d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And reaks not his own rede.'

'Tooooooo hard' wailed one quizzer, and only one person at SPS correctly solved this clue: Miss Muir - we salute you.

The second clue wasn't much easier: Across (5): Hassle to take other route for drunken knight (8).  Hassle gives you 'faff', and adding the second bit of 'et al' (the Latin abbreviation for 'other') and 'st' (route, as in street) produced Falstaff, Shakespeare's 'drunken knight'.  

Orson Welles as Falstaff, in Chimes at Midnight, his brilliant adaptation of the Henry IV plays

With crosswords, sometimes answers hide in plain sight, and Across (7): Boors in office - including this melancholy Duke (6) was one such example. Look more closely at the clue, and you'll find the name of Shakespeare's 'melancholy Duke' Orsino: 'Boors in office'.  

Across (8): Some of my French - a victim of slander and circumstantial evidence. (9) asked you to dip back into your GCSE French grammar for some ('de') and of my ('de mon'). Follow them with 'a' et voilà - it's Desdemona. Victim of slander, thanks to Iago. The circumstantial evidence against her is the handkerchief she 'let fall by chance'. Evidence so ridiculously slender that critic Thomas Rymer couldn't take the play seriously as a tragedy, scoffing that it was simply 'a warning to all good Wives, that they take care of their Linnen'.

 

In Across (11), 1d: Imperial contender's arduous instinct unravels (5, 10), 'unravels' tells you this is an anagram: juggle the letters of 'arduous instinct' to reveal warrior (and nightmare Bake-Off contestant) Titus Andronicus. Down (3): Cold attendant follows sign of summer - tragic opening with Egyptian God and queen (9) -  this one was tough: cold is 'C', sign of summer is 'Leo', followed by 'PA' (attendant), the opening of 'tragic' (t) and the Egyptian God Ra - all of which adds up to 'Cleopatra', as an impressive ten of you deduced.

Sophie Okonedo as Cleopatra (RNT)

Down (4), 9a: Villain's spouse is ably matched in dissemblance (4, 7).  This was another anagram: the definer is 'villain's spouse', so you're looking for the husband or wife of a Shakespearean villain - in itself, a fairly short list. But if you're stuck for ideas, take the words 'ably matched', and diss-assemble them to produce Lady Macbeth.  Easiest clue in the crossword apparently - 16 of you figured it out.  

Down (6): Ruin cools a befuddled and proud general (10) is another anagram: the words you need to befuddle are 'ruin cools a', giving you 'Coriolanus'.  Down (7): Valiant warrior's exaggerated greeting wastes time (7) was fiddlier. Another term for 'exaggerated' is 'over-the-top', often abbreviated to 'OTT'. Waste time (take out one of the 't's), add a greeting ('hello') - and you get Shakespeare's 'valiant warrior' Othello.

 
The final clue - Down (10): Sir Henry Percy's fashionable urge (7) Hotspur - could be decoded as follows. Another word for fashionable is 'hot' - 

and an urge can be a 'spur' - which gives you Harry Percy from Henry IV Part I: 'Hotspur' by nickname, but cold as dust and food for worms by the time Prince Hal's finished with him. And pretty much like most people, by the time they'd finished with our quiz ...

So - the winners. This year's contest was tight, with high scores from several students (and their parents: thanks for taking part!).  But there was one clear winner - drum roll please!

Yes, it's a remarkable double victory for last year's champion, Max SWINNERton - congratulations!!! - with the incredibly high score of 86.  Theo Frankel, Lachlan Murray and Enyu Hu were commendable runners up, and special mentions go to Atom Lucenet, Adam Seydo, Rohan George and Zac Joseph for particularly witty and ingenious answers.  

Our thanks once again to everyone who contributed questions - Mr Harris, Mr Green, Dr McDonnell, Mr Dormandy, Miss Muir, Mr Kemp, Miss McLaren, Mr Gardner - and to everyone who participated: we hoped you enjoyed it, and have a wonderful Easter!