Q1
An American union agitator who gave her name to a periodical; an elderly widow with a remarkable canine companion; and Arthur Lucan’s alter-ego. Why might you remember them all in March?
CLUES
- The elderly widow is well known to small children, and has been for centuries.
- You’d remember them in May in the USA.
Q2
Why do an Existentialist drama, a Jacobean theatrical Parasite and a bleak rewriting of The Coral Island constitute a health hazard?
CLUES
- Some translation is required in this question.
- If you’re baffled, go with whatever’s buzzing round in your head.
A1
Because they are all known as Mother, and Mother’s Day/Mothering Sunday is traditionally celebrated in March in the UK (it’s the second Sunday in May in the US).
Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones, 1830–1930) was an Irish-born nineteenth-century campaigner for workers’ rights, and is also the name of a left-wing American news magazine.
The widow with the dog is Old Mother Hubbard from the nursery rhyme, first printed in 1805 and among the most popular publications of the nineteenth century. The exact origin and meaning of the rhyme are disputed.
Arthur Lucan (1887–1954) was Old Mother Riley, a comic washerwoman character he devised in the 1930s for a music-hall act that led to a total of 16 film appearances. The act required a great deal of racing about and grotesque bodily positions. The character had a pretty daughter Kitty, played by Lucan’s wife, Dublin-born Kitty McShane (1898–1964).
A2
Because they are flies, or are about flies. Flies may carry on their feet millions of micro-organisms that in a large enough dose can cause disease.
Les Mouches (The Flies; a play by Jean Paul Sartre, 1943); Mosca (meaning a fly, the title character Volpone’s parasite in Ben Jonson’s play of 1605); and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which consciously transposes J. M. Ballantyne’s 1858 children’s adventure novel The Coral Island into a less innocent twentieth-century setting – its chief characters Ralph, Jack and Peterkin becoming Ralph, Jack and Piggy.
Q3
Why might the chronicler of Yoknapatawpha County find it easy to handle George Sanders and the man who urged ‘For God’s sake look after our people’?
CLUES
- He would probably need some protective clothing nevertheless.
- The connection with the last part of the clue may not be immediately obvious, but what was his middle name?
Q4
Theoretically, why might Euclid have appreciated:
1. the site of Wyld’s Great Globe at the Great Exhibition;
2. the club whose motto is Indocilis Privata Loqui; and
3. a mysterious bit of the Atlantic?
CLUES
- If your mind is in good shape you’ll do OK at this question.
- The Great Exhibition is the one held in London in 1851.
A3
Because he is a falconer, or Faulkner, and they are both falcons.
William Faulkner wrote many novels about the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which was an amalgam of the places and people familiar to him around Oxford, Mississippi. They include As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) and Sanctuary (1931).
The Falcon was a character, originally played by George Sanders, who featured in 16 B-pictures in the 1940s. The films characters were based on the novels of Michael Arlen. After three films Sanders bored of the role and it was handed over to his brother Tom Conway, who played the Falcon’s fictional brother.
Robert Falcon Scott died in March 1912, two weeks before the Titanic sank, while on an Antarctic expedition – but his body and those of his companions were not found until the November. His last, enigmatic, journal entry, on 29 March 1912, ended: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’
A4
They all relate to phrases which include geometric shapes: respectively a square, a circle and a triangle. Euclid of Alexandria wrote thirteen books in which he set out a series of key geometric theorems used by mathematicians throughout history.
To coincide with the Great Exhibition of 1851 James Wyld, MP, distinguished geographer and map-maker, exhibited a giant globe in Leicester Square in London which became known as Wyld’s Great Globe.
The Magic Circle was formed in 1905 by a group of twenty-three amateur and professional magicians. On the cover of the first issue of The Magic Circular were the signs of the zodiac which, together with the words Indocilis Privata Loqui, were destined to become the club’s emblem. The Latin motto means ‘not apt to disclose secrets’.
The Bermuda Triangle is a notional area off the south-eastern Atlantic coast of the US, noted for a high incidence of unexplained losses of ships, small boats, and aircraft. One theory behind the spate of disappearances is that the Triangle is one of the two places on earth where a magnetic compass points towards true north rather than magnetic north – causing navigators to get into difficulties if the compass variation or error is not compensated for.
Q5
What quality do these all share with the title character of Beethoven’s only opera?
CLUES
- That’s not just any old geyser: you need to know its name.
- Perhaps slightly confusingly, the opera is known by two names, as is the character.
Q6
An executioner at Tyburn in the eighteenth century might happily voyage alongside an inhabitant of the castle of Gormenghast and a hit song by Echo & the Bunnymen. Why?
CLUES
- As soon as you get one of these clues you’ll sail through the rest of it.
- We’re looking for a particular executioner, not just a general word for an executioner.
A5
Fidelity.
Marianne Faithfull (b.1946) became famous in 1964 as a singer, and a good deal more famous as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. She was a star and sex symbol for most of the 1960s but fame and hard drugs took their toll on her career and her voice. In 1979 she made something of a comeback with a critically praised, confessional album called Broken English. The title it was given in France, Anglaise cassée, points up an apposite interpretation of the title, even if it wasn’t intended.
Fidel Castro (1926–2016) was Cuba’s Communist revolutionary leader who came to power after the war overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959, and led the country for almost 50 years. He handed the reins to his brother Raúl in 2008.
The world-famous geyser in Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming) is called Old Faithful – named by the explorer of the American West Henry D. Washburn in 1870, and aptly so. It erupts, reliably and spectacularly, many times every day, at intervals of between three-quarters of an hour and two hours.
Fidelio is Beethoven’s only opera, premiered in its original version in 1805. Beethoven originally called it Leonore but the Vienna theatre where it was staged insisted on changing the title to avoid confusion with other similarly titled operas popular at the time. The work went through several revisions and the title Fidelio is now given only to the 1814 version, earlier versions being sufficiently different to be distinguished by Beethoven’s original title.
A6
The clues all point to types of sailing ship.
The eighteenth-century executioner is Jack Ketch, one of the most notorious operators of the Tyburn gallows, which stood on a spot near what’s now Marble Arch until 1783. A ketch is a two-masted yacht.
The character in the castle of Gormenghast, from Mervyn Peake’s novels Titus Groan (1946) and Gormenghast (1950), is Barquentine, the librarian. A barquentine is ‘a three-masted vessel with the fore-mast square-rigged, the main and mizzen fore- and aft-rigged’.
The Echo & the Bunnymen hit is ‘The Cutter’ – a top-10 hit in the UK from their 1983 album Porcupine – a cutter being also a name for a small, fast sailing ship.
Q7
A 25-year-old beauty who struck a fatal blow for royalty, another young woman who could think of nothing to say, and a matador who couldn’t stay away should suggest a common thread. Who are they?
CLUES
- Two of these are real people and one is fictional, as far as we know.
- The 25-year-old beauty is someone from French history.
Q8
At a disastrous house-party a famous drug-dealer stains a sofa, the owner of a nuclear power plant sets fire to it, and a female pop star steals some valuables. The exasperated homeowner, an explorer, imposes a financial penalty for the damage. Who is he?
CLUES
- This whole question relies on puns.
- One of these people is fictional.
A7
This one should strike a chord, or, to be precise, a CORD.
The 25-year-old aristocratic beauty who murdered the revolutionary politician Jean-Paul Marat in his bath on 13 July 1793 was Charlotte Corday. She was guillotined four days later.
The third daughter who could think of nothing to say – in Shakespeare’s King Lear – was Cordelia.
Lear: What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?
Cord.: Nothing, my Lord.
(Act I, Scene i)
The plot of King Lear is taken from a supposedly ‘historical’ account in Ralph Holinshed’s sixteenth-century Chronicles; but there is scant reliable evidence for any of it.
The matador who couldn’t stay away was El Cordobés (Manuel Benítez Pérez, b.1936), the most famous Spanish bullfighter of the twentieth century, who made a comeback in 1979 after a much-publicized and much-lamented retirement from the ring in 1972.
A8
Sir Ranulph Fiennes (b.1944). He fines the other guests whose names all suggest other active verbs.
The drug dealer is Howard Marks (b.1945) who served seven years in a US high security penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, for drug offences and published his autobiography Mr Nice in 1996 – he marks the sofa.
The owner of the nuclear power plant (and the only fictional character here) is Mr Burns (Charles Montgomery Burns) from The Simpsons, voiced by Harry Shearer. Obviously enough, he burns the sofa.
The pop star is Stevie Nicks (b.1948), singer with Fleetwood Mac on many of their multi-platinum albums including Rumours, Tusk, Mirage and Tango in the Night. She nicks the valuables.
Q9
If Act 5 Scene i of The Tempest reappeared in 1932, and Act 2 Scene iii of Twelfth Night in 1930, what happened to the third line of Sonnet 18 in 1958?
CLUES
- Shakespearean phrases have often provided inspiration for later writers.
- The third line of Sonnet 18 became even more familiar to TV viewers of a later generation.
Q10
What tasteful connection might there be between Carmen Miranda, above the neck, Josephine Baker, around the waist, and Lady Gaga, from head to toe?
CLUES
- The Lady Gaga reference concerns a widely reported incident of 2010.
- Don’t make too much of a meal of this question.
A9
The clues lead to titles of twentieth-century novels lifted from Shakespeare.
So Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, takes its three-word title from a speech of Miranda in Act 5 Scene i of The Tempest: ‘How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t’.
Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale, published in 1930, uses part of a speech by Sir Toby Belch in Act 2 Scene iii of Twelfth Night: ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?’
The third line of Sonnet 18 is the one that goes ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’, the last five words of which were used in 1958 by H. E. Bates for the first of his five novels about the Larkin family, and subsequently for the ITV series based on them.
A10
They wore clothes made of food.
Portuguese performer Carmen Miranda (1909–55) became well known for her fruit hats, often very elaborate and piled very high, earning her the nickname ‘the lady in the tutti-frutti hat’.
Josephine Baker notoriously wore a skirt of bananas in her act at the Folies Bergère in the 1920s, her striptease routine involving picking them off one at a time.
Lady Gaga appeared at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards in a dress (along with a little hat and big boots) made of raw beef. It was designed by Franc Fernandez to a style by Nicola Formichetti. Lady Gaga explained the dress as a statement about the need to express publicly what one believes in, citing particularly the US Army’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy on sexual orientation.