Q1
Coming or going, either way you’d be just as likely to encounter Magwitch’s beneficiary, a collaborative Premier, a financier and economics guru, and an English writer who resurrected Hercule Poirot. Why, and who are they?
CLUES
- Magwitch is a Dickensian character.
- The Premier, it’s generally accepted, was ‘collaborative’ in a negative rather than a constructive sense.
Q2
What biblical link connects stories by Faulkner to a world record hurdler and a naive American artist?
CLUES
- We’re looking for a major biblical character who connects them all.
- The hurdler’s best remembered achievements were in the 1970s and 1980s
A1
Their surnames are all palindromes, hence you’d find them the same whether they were coming (forwards) or going (backwards).
Abel Magwitch’s beneficiary, the intended recipient of his fortune in Dickens’s Great Expectations, is Philip Pirrip – abbreviated throughout, of course, to Pip, which is also a palindrome.
The man who led the collaborating Vichy government of France in 1942–4 was Pierre Laval, executed by firing squad in 1945.
The financier is George Soros (b.1930), Hungarian-American businessman, currency speculator and prophet of the markets.
The writer who in recent years has published a series of novels featuring the great Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, 40 years after Dame Agatha Christie laid him to rest, is Sophie Hannah (b.1971). She is an acclaimed poet and has also created another successful crime-novel series featuring detectives Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer, some of which have been televised. She is the daughter of regular Round Britain Quiz panellist Adèle Geras.
A2
The name Moses.
Go Down, Moses is a collection of short stories by William Faulkner, which appeared in 1942.
Ed Moses (b.1955) won Olympic gold in the 400-metre hurdles in 1976 and 1984.
‘Grandma Moses’ (Anna Mary Robertson Moses, 1860–1961) became famous in the early twentieth century as a naive folk painter.
Q3
What might Dr Parnassus do with Molière’s Argan, Soren Lorenson and the square root of -1?
CLUES
- Soren Lorenson might be familiar if you have read children’s picture books in the past couple of decades.
- Don’t try to work out the square root of -1. Part of the point is that you can’t.
Q4
What might be the common location of all of these?
CLUES
- It will help to know the name of the strip cartoon in which the characters in the third picture appear.
- The band in the first picture is of Welsh origin.
A3
He would very likely collect them for his Imaginarium – as in the Terry Gilliam film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009, lead role played by Christopher Plummer) – because these are all imaginary things.
Molière’s comedies often rely on the main character having one particular and exaggerated flaw or obsession, which the other characters make fun of and exploit. Many of these comic roles were played on the stage by Molière himself. The hypochondriac Argan in Le Malade Imaginaire (1673) was Molière’s last role before his death – he collapsed on stage during his fourth performance as Argan, just a week after the premiere.
Soren Lorenson, as many parents of small children will know, is the imaginary friend of Lola in the picture books about Charlie and Lola, by the English writer and illustrator Lauren Child (b.1965).
The square root of -1 is an example of an imaginary number. There is no known number which, when multiplied by itself, can possibly give -1. All imaginary numbers are in fact multiples of √-1 and it is therefore often known as i, the imaginary unit. The term ‘imaginary number’ was coined by mathematicians in the seventeenth century and the concept was derided as pointless, but such numbers have gained a more important place in modern mathematics where they are an essential element of what are known as ‘complex numbers’.
A4
You’d find them on the ‘street’, because all the answers feature streets as the middle element of a three-word phrase.
The band in the picture is the Manic Street Preachers, formed in the late 1980s in Blackwood in Caerphilly.
The Bow Street Runners were the first official police force of the city of London. They were established in 1749 by the novelist Henry Fielding, then a London Court Magistrate, regulating the disparate and corrupt law enforcement system that had previously operated.
The Bash Street Kids are probably the most famous creation of artist Leo Baxendale, who drew their adventures in the Beano comic from 1954 until David Sutherland took them over in the 1960s. The picture shows a commemorative UK postage stamp depicting characters from the strip, marking the 75th anniversary of the Beano comic.
Q5
What material connection is there between Beowulf, the Salem witch trials and a cry of ‘Wakey-wakey’?
CLUES
- The word ‘material’ is, er, material to the question.
- You’re looking for three people who share a name.
Q6
Which restless quintet might be associated with a second crop after the harvest, a feast for those in penury, what you’d have if you’d been making a collage, and an unappetizing-sounding broth?
CLUES
- Getting the answer to this will give you satisfaction.
- If you grew up in the 1960s you’re probably at an advantage with this one.
A5
Cotton.
The only extant manuscript of the Old English poem Beowulf is the Cotton MS, so called because it came into the possession of the seventeenth-century manuscript collector Sir Robert Cotton. It was catalogued as Cotton Vitellius A XV (the fifteenth volume on the first shelf under the bust of Vitellius in Cotton’s library). A fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster in 1731, where the Cotton collection was housed, did serious damage to the MS of Beowulf and also to one of the only four extant copies of Magna Carta, which was also in Cotton’s collection. The Cotton collection was moved to the British Museum in the mid-eighteenth century and is now in the British Library.
Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was a New England Puritan preacher and pamphleteer whose suspicions, and writings and speeches in condemnation, of women and girls caught up in the witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, are regarded as having greatly fanned the flames of the hysteria.
Billy Cotton (1899–1969) was best known for Billy Cotton’s Band Show which was always introduced with his catchphrase exclamation of ‘Wakey-wakey!’ He set up his own dance band, the London Savannah Band, in 1924, and it featured major British jazz musicians Nat Gonella and Arthur Rosebery. ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’ was its theme song. Cotton toured with ENSA during the Second World War and was given his radio series in 1949. It lasted until 1968 when he became too ill to continue, and he died the following year. His son (Sir) Bill Cotton became managing director of BBC television.
A6
The ‘restless’ quintet is the Rolling Stones – restless because a rolling stone proverbially gathers no moss. The elements suggest four Rolling Stones album titles.
The second crop after the harvest is the Aftermath (1966) – a word now much more commonly used metaphorically.
A feast for those in penury might be a Beggars Banquet (1968).
When you’ve made a collage you’re likely to have Sticky Fingers (1971).
Continuing the sequence, an unappetizing-sounding broth is therefore Goats Head Soup (1973).
Q7
Put the following in lyrical order and suggest which might be the odd one out: a wise person, Bing Crosby’s love interest in White Christmas, a chronologizing magazine and an animated lion.
CLUES
- Bing’s love interest is another singer.
- There’s a connection with the North Yorkshire coast.
Q8
What’s enlightening about a modern minimalist composer, an Irishman hanged for treason in 1916 and an Oxford college that was the last male preserve?
CLUES
- The composer is American.
- Get any one of these elements and you’ll probably see the light straight away.
A7
The elements give us Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.
Another name for a wise person is a sage.
Bing Crosby’s love interest in the Michael Curtiz film White Christmas (1954) was Betty, played by Rosemary Clooney (1928–2002). The film features the song ‘White Christmas’ but Crosby first sang it in the earlier Holiday Inn (1942). Rosemary Clooney was George Clooney’s aunt.
A chronologizing magazine would be Time, created in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, the first weekly news magazine in the United States.
Parsley was the ‘very friendly lion’ in the BBC animated children’s TV series The Herbs, created in 1968 by Paddington author Michael Bond. Other characters included Dill the dog, the aristocratic Sir Basil and Lady Rosemary, teacher Mr Onion and his pupils, the little chives.
These four herbs appear in this order in the lyrics to the folk song ‘Scarborough Fair’, recorded many times but perhaps most famously by Simon & Garfunkel on their album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966).
The odd one out is Time as its spelling differs from that of the herb in question.
A8
They’re ‘enlightening’ because their names all suggest windows.
Philip Glass (b.1937) is the composer.
Roger Casement was hanged for treason in 1916 after visiting Germany to recruit help for the Irish nationalist cause.
Oriel College was the last Oxford college to admit women students (as late as 1988). An oriel window is a bay-window in an upper storey.
Q9
An annoying black fly prevalent in spring; a therapeutic yellow-flowering herb; a spell of good weather in the autumn; and a Bach masterpiece. What are they all doing in the rushes, o?
CLUES
- The final phrase is a reference to another folk song, and it may help to remember the words.
- If you’re thinking ‘Indian summer’ you need to find a different phrase for the same thing.
Q10
On which road might you have encountered the Dark Lady of DNA, a still superhero, London’s Mercurial editor and Lassie’s father?
CLUES
- In fact, these represent just four of a much larger group.
- Originally you’d have found them on horseback.
A9
They are named after the four evangelists – who crop up in the traditional song ‘Green Grow The Rushes, O’ in a line about ‘the Gospel makers’:
Five for the symbols at your door,
Four for the Gospel makers …
St Mark’s fly, Bibio marci, is a quite large but harmless black fly with dangly legs which swarms and becomes a pest in Britain in late April/early May. It’s so called because the feast day of St Mark is 25th April.
St John’s wort, Hypericum perforatum, is a yellow-flowering meadow herb whose name (again) derives from the fact that it flowers around the feast day of St John, 24th June. It’s used as an alternative therapy for treating mild depression.
A late spell of dry, warm weather (around St Luke’s Day, 18th October) is traditionally called a St Luke’s Summer – a term now more or less superceded by the American phrase an ‘Indian summer’, meaning pretty much the same.
J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion, a setting of the Latin mass first performed in 1729, is widely regarded as his greatest achievement in choral music.
A10
On the road between London and Canterbury – which was the pilgrim route to the shrine of St Thomas Becket. The people in the question share their names with four of Chaucer’s pilgrims making that journey in The Canterbury Tales: Franklin, Reeve, Squire, Knight.
The title ‘The Dark Lady of DNA’ has often been applied – notably in the title of Brenda Maddox’s 2002 biography – to Rosalind Franklin, who worked alongside Crick, Watson and Wilkins to identify the structure of DNA, but who was denied a Nobel Prize by her early death from cancer in 1958.
The still superhero is Christopher Reeve (1952–2004), the actor who played Superman in the 1970s and 80s, but was then paralysed in a riding accident; his autobiography was published in 1998 under the title Still Me, a brilliant, if slightly macabre, pun.
The literary periodical the London Mercury was most notable for its opposition to modernism in all its forms. It was edited by J. C. Squire, who was himself a poet.
Lassie’s father, although obviously not in the strictly biological sense, was the writer Eric Knight, who created the character of the collie with a conscience in a story for the Saturday Evening Post in 1938.