Q1
Why would you look for treasure in an anchorite’s dwelling in Russia, in offices in Italy or in an old leper colony in France?
CLUES
- All of these places are very much on the tourist trail.
- You would not have to search hard for the treasure. It is all around you, in all three places.
Q2
What do the poet who eulogized Brooklyn Bridge, a churchman who’s buried beside Stella and the creator of Briggflatts and of overdrafts from Persia have in common?
CLUES
- These people are, respectively, an American, an Irishman and an Englishman.
- It’s arguable where they would each come in the pecking order.
A1
Because they’re all great art museums.
The Hermitage (properly the State Hermitage Museum) in St Petersburg is Russia’s greatest art museum, housing a collection of some three million items in five buildings, including the world famous Winter Palace built in the 1750s.
The offices are the Uffizi (Galleria degli Uffizi) in Florence, designed in the 1560s by Giorgio Vasari, originally to house the magistrati or public offices of the city. As early as 1581 the top floor had become a gallery; the building now houses one of Europe’s most valuable collections.
The ‘leper colony’ is the probable origin of the word Louvre, given since medieval times to the area in Paris now occupied by the vast museum of that name. It’s housed in a former royal palace, which was converted to a gallery in 1793 to show off the treasures of the French kings – there having been no real call for a palace any more.
A2
All three have birds’ names as a surname.
The poet who eulogized Brooklyn Bridge is Hart Crane (1899–1932), in his long poem of 1930, The Bridge.
The churchman is Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), whose intimate letters to Esther Johnson (‘Stella’) were published as Journal to Stella. He was buried by her side in St Patrick’s, Dublin, where he was Dean.
Basil Bunting (1900–85) was probably the foremost Northumbrian poet of the twentieth century, who worked as a journalist on a local paper in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the years before the publication of his most famous work, the long poem Briggflatts (1966). His incantatory style was heavily influenced by Ezra Pound and he published translations of poems from Latin and Persian, under the title Overdrafts.
Q3
What might be the vehicle of choice of Pip’s lawyer acquaintance, a printer of the First Folio and the Dartford warbler?
CLUES
- Unlike in the previous question, in this instance the Dartford warbler is not a bird.
- The vehicle would be appropriate for the third but entirely anachronistic for the first two.
Q4
Explain why, and when, you could have found all of the following sailing under Hart’s flag at teatime: someone who looks after horses, an ericaceous landscape, a spiced dish and the spot where they laid the Earl of Moray?
CLUES
- These four are taken from what is now a very long sequence.
- They were very often accompanied by pet animals.
A3
A Jag; because JAG are the first three letters of all three names.
The lawyer who takes Pip under his wing and administers his mysteriously sourced allowance, in Dickens’s Great Expectations, is Mr Jaggers.
One of the two printers of the Shakespeare First Folio (1623) credited on the title page is Isaac Jaggard (in collaboration with the bookseller Edward Blount). It was Isaac’s father, William Jaggard, who was given the commission for the First Folio, but his son Isaac had taken over the business by the time the book was published, and it is his name on the title page below the famous engraved portrait.
The ‘Dartford Warbler’ is a perhaps unkind reference to Dartford’s most famous son, Sir Mick Jagger. Born in July 1943, he has been the lead singer of the Rolling Stones since he was 19.
A4
They all suggest the surnames of presenters on the BBC children’s TV show Blue Peter – and they all appeared (although not all simultaneously) in the 1980s.
The famous blue-and-white ship design, recognized by generations of children as the programme’s emblem, was created in 1963 by the artist and children’s TV presenter Tony Hart. Sharing the studio set with them, routinely, were the show’s various cats and dogs.
The four presenters suggested by the clues are: Simon Groom (who was with the show in 1978–86); Tina Heath (1979–80); Mark Curry (1986–9); and Sarah Greene (1980–3). The Moray reference is to the often-misheard folk song in which ‘they have slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green’. The mishearing has given rise to the coinage ‘mondegreen’, meaning a word or phrase that’s mistaken for another, often to comical effect.
Q5
In what ways are Strauss’s operatic quest, Gene Pitney’s first million-selling hit and Musil’s Vienna epic lacking, and what therefore connects them with Vanity Fair?
CLUES
- The Gene Pitney song is the theme from a film.
- Musil never actually finished his epic, but that’s not the point.
Q6
What kind of tranquil location might be common to a famous daughter of Rochdale, a photographer who recorded life in North Yorkshire and a nostalgic novelist from Gloucestershire?
CLUES
- They don’t share the same name, but their names have a connection.
- Nostalgia is a theme in the work of all three.
A5
They are all ‘without’ something.
Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), with a libretto by Hofmannsthal, was first performed in Vienna in 1919. The woman of the title is the Empress, a supernatural being who emerged from a white gazelle shot by the Emperor while out hunting. Because theirs is a union of human and spirit, she can bear no children, and this barrenness is symbolized by her lack of a shadow. She must undergo many trials and much subterfuge in the course of the opera in her quest to become human, acquire her shadow, and have a chance of happiness through bearing children.
The movie Town Without Pity (1961) starred Kirk Douglas as a US Army major with the unenviable task of defending four young GIs after they gang-rape a teenage girl in a German village where they’re stationed. Its subject matter and unflinching treatment made it strong stuff for the time. Dimitri Tiomkin’s Oscar-nominated theme song became Gene Pitney’s first million seller.
Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s major work is the enormous Proustian masterpiece The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), begun in 1921 and still unfinished at his death in 1942. A detailed portrait of decadent fin-de-siècle Vienna, it contains many autobiographical elements. Musil’s giant work brought him no fame or wealth; he toiled at it daily, at the expense of the need to provide for his family. But Thomas Mann admired it hugely, and Milan Kundera has cited it as one of the most important literary works of all time.
The subtitle of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8) is A Novel Without a Hero – the male characters being venal and flawed, and the principal female character who walks all over them, Becky Sharp, being more of an anti-heroine.
A6
They all have names with roughly the same bucolic connotation.
The inhabitant of Rochdale is Dame Gracie Fields, née Stansfield (1898–1979), singer, comedienne and film star whose wartime performances for the troops in Europe became legendary.
The photographer is Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (1853–1941), of Whitby, whose sometimes sentimental sepia portraits of fishing-village life are ubiquitous in the town’s gift shops and galleries.
The novelist is Laurie Lee (1914–97), author of that most brilliant of evocations of youth, Cider with Rosie (and of course a lea is a meadow or field).
Q7
Why might you find a knight of the Round Table, a pioneering astronomer and a Shakespearean foot-soldier all accelerating towards the state of Michigan?
CLUES
- You’ll find the foot-soldier mentioned in Macbeth.
- They would be heading for a particular town in Michigan, immortalized in a song.
Q8
A subdivision of an Act, several ungulates, St Clement’s material and the Osmeridae. Did you sense that something was missing?
CLUES
- There is a reason why the question is in the past tense.
- Osmeridae are a family of fish, if that’s any help.
A7
They all have ‘Gal’ at the beginning of their names so they might be accelerating to Kalamazoo.
The knight of the Round Table we have in mind is Sir Galahad; the pioneering astronomer Galileo Galilei; and the Shakespearian foot-soldier a gallowglass (as in ‘kerns and gallowglasses’, classes of Scottish soldier mentioned in Macbeth).
Their common element being gal, you might find them in Kalamazoo, Michigan (since the song claims ‘I’ve got a gal in Kalamazoo’).
And they’d be accelerating because the gal is the unit of measurement of acceleration due to gravity, equal to 1 cm per second squared.
A8
The clues should all lead to four senses – as in scene, herd (heard), felt and smelt. They are, therefore, homophones of the past tenses of verbs relating to four of the five senses. If you sensed – pun and clue (and past tense) intended – that something was missing, that something would be ‘tasted’, for which, as far as we know, no homophone exists.
As any playgoer or reader of Shakespeare knows, a play is subdivided into acts, and those acts are themselves subdivided into scenes.
Likewise, when ungulates such as cows gather together, that grouping is described as a herd.
The invention of felt has been attributed, among many others, to St Clement, who is supposed to have accidentally invented it by walking on wool for long periods to prevent blisters, and thus compressing it while also sweating into it.
That leaves smelt: Osmeridae is the Latin name for the family of small fish known as smelts (or more precisely freshwater or typical smelts, to distinguish them from related species that also bear the name). They resemble salmon but are smaller, and as a result of this are often eaten by them, which proves that imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery, but also the surest way of getting killed.
Q9
Where might you find the following, and in what category would you group them?
CLUES
- They’d all make pretty loyal companions.
- The connection between them is a question of breeding.
Q10
What, or rather who, is the missing link between: the phone number of a hotel in New York; a small earthen receptacle; a streetcar interchange with the name of a dinner jacket; and a vigilant group of GIs?
CLUES
- The link is ‘missing’ in more than one sense.
- You could just say the answers, but we defy you not to hum them once you’ve worked them out.
A9
These people have the same name as breeds of spaniel – so the answer is at Crufts, in the gundog group.
Three of the official gundog breeds as recognized by the Kennel Club are Spaniel (Sussex), Spaniel (English springer) and Spaniel (Cocker).
Prince Harry is the Duke of Sussex.
British-born TV talk-show host Jerry Springer (b.1944) is best known for hosting The Jerry Springer Show since 1991. He is a former Democrat mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio, a former newsreader, a musician and the subject of Jerry Springer: The Opera.
Jarvis Cocker (b.1962) was the frontman of the British rock band Pulp, and is a writer and broadcaster.
A10
‘Missing’ is a pertinent word because the link is Glenn Miller, who went missing when his aircraft disappeared over the English Channel on 15 December 1944. He was, of course, presumed dead, but no plane or body was ever found. Gossip was rife for many years that he was serving breakfasts in a café in Herne Bay, or living under an alias in a French brothel, pre-dating similar rumours about Elvis by three decades.
The four titles are:
‘Pennsylvania 6-5000’, the phone number of the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City – which is still the same, allowing for innovations in coding – (212) 736–5000.
The receptacle is a ‘Little Brown Jug’.
The streetcar interchange is ‘Tuxedo Junction’ (a real streetcar junction in Birmingham, Alabama, which gave its name to a jazz club).
The vigilant GIs would be an ‘American Patrol’.