Q1
Where would it get us, if we adopted an early interpretation of quantum mechanics, made promises about sovereignty and human rights, and started sympathizing with those holding us captive?
CLUES
- You need three specific phrases that relate to those descriptions.
- Pack some warm clothing.
Q2
A female traveller and mystic of fourteenth-century England shares something with a comic actor in Shakespeare’s company, a twentieth-century conductor and a fictional ghost. What?
CLUES
- Only the ghost is fictional, the others were real people.
- The actor appears as a character in both the TV sitcom Upstart Crow and the film Shakespeare in Love.
A1
To northern Europe – specifically, to three capital cities.
The interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by physicists Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others in the 1920s is known as the Copenhagen interpretation. It’s an attempt to explain why quantum mechanics appears to contradict many of the principles of classical physics. The interpretation is not clearly defined anywhere and doesn’t have a single text or a set of rules associated with it; but it forms the basis of what the majority of students have been taught about quantum mechanics ever since.
Thirty-five world leaders signed a declaration in Helsinki in 1975 advocating human rights and respect for the sovereignty of states and the self-determination of peoples – in an attempt to improve relations between Western and communist blocs in Europe. The principles agreed were known as the Helsinki accords or Helsinki declaration. It had no legal status.
When prisoners start sympathizing with, even feeling affection for, their captors, they are displaying the psychological condition called Stockholm syndrome – sometimes known as capture-bonding. It’s named after an incident at the Kreditbanken in Stockholm in 1973, when a number of bank employees were held hostage, but became emotionally attached to their captors during the six-day siege and later defended their behaviour.
A2
The answer is the name Kemp, with or without an ‘e’ on the end.
Margery Kempe is the English mystic whose The Boke of Margery Kempe is something of a fourteenth-century classic.
The Shakespearean actor is Will Kemp, who starred in many comic roles with the Chamberlain’s Men at the turn of the seventeenth century.
The conductor is Rudolf Kempe (1910–76), principal conductor and later artistic director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1960s and 1970s.
And the fictional ghost is Thomas Kempe in the 1973 children’s novel The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively.
Q3
One little boy suffered the arrows of public disapproval; 40 years later, up the street, another caused a tempestuous outcry. But a third, a different city’s ‘oldest citizen’, goes much further in his show of defiance. Who are they?
CLUES
- All of these little boys are still with us, but none of them has grown up.
- One of them has a particular association with the BBC.
Q4
Pair a Roman soldier shot through with arrows and a Gothic wanderer. What’s the link with Swallows and Amazons and Prince Charming?
CLUES
- This is a tough one: we’re looking for a pseudonym used by a historical figure.
- Whose voice do you hear when you think of Prince Charming?
A3
They are three statues of boys which have offended public morals.
Alfred Gilbert’s statue popularly known as Eros, actually thought to depict Anteros, with wings and bow and arrow, was erected in Piccadilly Circus in London in 1893 atop the fountain memorial to the Victorian philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury, one of the prime movers of nineteenth-century poor relief. The statue caused a scandal, despite the intention to symbolize Shaftesbury’s selfless love for the young and unfortunate.
Ariel, sculpted by Eric Gill, was installed on the front of the newly completed BBC Broadcasting House (about half a mile up Regent Street from Piccadilly Circus) in 1933. The cloaked figure of Prospero stands behind him. The dissemination of wisdom and magic by a fleet-footed spirit of the air was considered an appropriate symbol of the fledgling broadcasting industry. His nakedness too caused a furore, and indignant questions were asked in the Commons about the sculpture’s potential effect on public morality.
The ‘mannequin pis’ fountain just off the Grande Place in Brussels was designed in bronze by Jerôme Duquesnoy and erected in 1619. He’s fondly referred to by the populace as le plus vieux citoyen de Bruxelles. Legend has it that his merry urination is a symbol of the defiant independence of spirit of the city and its inhabitants.
A4
This is about Oscar Wilde.
The Roman soldier is Sebastian, martyred in ad 288 under the Emperor Diocletian for espousing Christianity.
The wanderer is Melmoth, from the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820).
Sebastian Melmoth was the wry pseudonym adopted by Oscar Wilde as he travelled Europe in 1898–1902 following his release from Reading Gaol. His final bill, from the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris where he was staying when he died, is made out to ‘Monsieur Melmoth’. It was settled by his loyal long-time friend Robbie Ross.
The first ever biography of Oscar Wilde, published in 1912, was by Arthur Ransome – best known for his children’s stories of which Swallows and Amazons is the first and most famous.
Wilde was recently portrayed on stage and on film by the British actor and writer Rupert Everett, first in the play The Judas Kiss (1998) and then in the movie The Happy Prince (2018), which he wrote and directed. Another of Everett’s best known film roles is as the suave voice of Prince Charming in the second and third Shrek films.
Q5
Which three items emerging from a single conflict in history might mean it could justifiably be referred to as the Cold War?
CLUES
- It was, famously, fought in very cold conditions.
- The three items are familiar to us even today.
Q6
A lighthouse keeper’s daughters and a journalist played by Kirk Douglas might have agreed that love is a many-splendored thing, whether they were high or low. Why?
CLUES
- See if you can get this all in one go.
- ‘Love Is a Many-splendored Thing’ is a song title.
A5
This is about the Crimean War, which was fought in famously perishing conditions, and which has no fewer than three separate items of warm clothing named after people or events associated with it.
The Raglan sleeve – cut right up to the neckline with no shoulder seam – was named after Fitzroy Henry James Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan (1788–1855), commander of British forces in the Crimea from 1854.
The Balaklava helmet was named after the Battle of Balaklava (also spelt Balaclava), which took place six miles from Sebastopol on 25 October 1854, the scene of the foolhardy Charge of the Light Brigade.
The cardigan is named after James Thomas Brudenell, the notoriously bad-tempered 7th Earl of Cardigan (1797–1868), who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. Despite the battlefield fiasco, he was treated as a hero on his return home.
A6
These are all Aces.
The Ace Sisters, Jessica Ace and Margaret Wright, the daughters of the Mumbles lighthouse keeper Abraham Ace, performed many rescues of shipwrecked sailors and are commemorated by a blue plaque noting their especially heroic rescue of the crew of the Mumbles lifeboat in 1883. Like their predecessor Grace Darling on the Northumberland coast 45 years earlier, they became internationally known through romanticized media accounts and folk songs.
The 1951 film by Billy Wilder, featuring Kirk Douglas, was Ace in the Hole. Douglas played a newspaperman with a gift of a story guaranteed to get him high circulation: a man stuck down a shaft. The film centres on the highly unethical decision to delay his rescue in order to keep the story hot.
‘Love is a Many-splendored Thing’ was the biggest hit song (in 1955) of the American singing quartet the Four Aces. It was used in a movie of the same title (and won an Oscar as Best Original Song of its year), and also in a US television soap opera based on the movie.
Q7
Why, if you’re arrested in the USA, might you remember an inn, or a sorcerer’s innocent daughter, or a moon of Uranus?
CLUES
- This is another question about a name that’s common to all of these elements.
- Moons of Uranus tend to have Shakespearean connotations.
Q8
Why might a schoolboy in a Benjamin Britten opera, a person from Jamaica, a politician derided as unkempt and a ruined abbey in County Down be regarded as imperial?
CLUES
- The politician is a British post-war figure, no longer with us.
- It might not take you long to get the measure of this question.
A7
Because police officers making arrests in the US are required by law to read the ‘Miranda Rule’ to the suspect – concerning their rights to remain silent, to representation by a lawyer, etc. It’s so called because of Ernesto A. Miranda of Arizona, whose conviction for rape was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1966 after it emerged he hadn’t been read his rights on arrest. The other references are other Mirandas.
‘Do you remember an inn, Miranda’ is the first line of Hilaire Belloc’s poem ‘Tarantella’ (1923), and recurs as a refrain several times in the poem.
Miranda is the daughter of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
One of the moons of Uranus is named Miranda, after the Shakespearean character. Also known as Uranus V, it’s the fifth-largest of the planet’s moons. Several of Uranus’s moons are named after characters in The Tempest.
A8
Because they give us the imperial measurements miles, yard, foot and inch.
Miles and his sister Flora are the children pursued by the spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw, based on the Henry James ghost story of 1898.
Yardie is Jamaican expatriate slang for a person from Jamaica, probably deriving from the ‘yard’, the focus of social interaction in the poor suburbs of Kingston. Bob Marley’s song ‘No Woman No Cry’ refers to recollections of ‘the government yard in Trenchtown’.
The British Labour politician and writer Michael Foot (1913–2010) was given rough treatment by the British tabloid press, especially at the time of his leadership of the party in 1980–3, finding himself nicknamed Worzel Gummidge for his somewhat informal dress at public events.
The castle in County Down is Inch Castle, on the banks of the River Quoile near Downpatrick.
Q9
Why might Moira Shearer be an appropriate cheerleader for the Yankees’ bitterest rivals? Which American film actor might join her? And which fairy-tale heroine might you employ to set off the ensemble?
CLUES
- These people appear, in a sense, in ascending order.
- We could easily have included a Butlin’s entertainer as one of the group.
Q10
A popularizer of civilization and an admirer of ankles; a painter of dancers in Montmartre and a maker of films; and an Eminent Victorian and a beached poet. Why might they all have attracted the attention of Turgenev?
CLUES
- The pairs of people in the descriptions all bear the same relationship to one another.
- If we had given you Civilisation, with a capital C and an ‘s’, it might have been easier.
A9
They could all provide red items for an outfit of clothing.
Moira Shearer (1926–2006), actress and dancer, took the lead role in the Powell and Pressburger film of the Frederick Ashton ballet, The Red Shoes (1948).
The Boston Red Sox’ rivalry with the New York Yankees is almost certainly the keenest in Major League baseball. For much of the twentieth century the popular legend was that the team had been cursed since it sold its biggest star Babe Ruth (nicknamed ‘the Bambino’) to the Yankees in 1920. After 86 fallow years, the Red Sox became the first team to win four World Series titles in the twenty-first century, winning in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018.
Red Buttons (1919–2006) was an American character actor with credits including The Poseidon Adventure (1972), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969), Stagecoach (1966), Pete’s Dragon (1977), The Longest Day (1962) and a part in the 1980s soap Knots Landing.
And Red Riding Hood might cap off the outfit.
A10
Because they are fathers and sons – and Ivan Turgenev wrote the novel Fathers and Sons (1862).
Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark (1903–83), wrote and presented what is still the best-known British TV series about art history, Civilisation. (The BBC made an updated, more multi-cultural series entitled Civilisations, with various presenters, some 50 years later.) The racy political diaries of son Alan Clark (1928–99), published in 1993, contain confessions of numerous indiscretions and infidelities, including a notorious passage in which, sitting in the House of Commons beside Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he notices how attractive her ankles are.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was one of the founders of the Impressionist movement; his Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876), depicting dancers and revellers at the Moulin de la Galette on the hill of Montmartre, is one of his most famous pictures, and is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. His son Jean Renoir (1894–1979) was a pioneer of realist cinema, his best known works being La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939).
Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), headmaster of Rugby School, was profiled by Lytton Strachey in his irreverent study Eminent Victorians (1918). His son, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88), wrote ‘Dover Beach’, one of the most famous expressions of Victorian uncertainty in the face of assaults on the tenets of faith.