The PEN Quiz 2011

November 21 saw the staging of the tenth Annual Colman Getty PEN Quiz. Each year teams from all the major publishers and broadsheet newspapers battle it out under the watchful eye of a celebrity Quizmaster, whilst raising essential funds towards PEN’s work defending freedom of expression, campaigning on behalf of persecuted writers worldwide and promoting literature and literacy in the UK.
 
Bamber Gascoigne served as quizmaster in the very first year, and John Humphreys, Jeremy Paxman, Mariella Frostrup, David Mitchell, Dara O’Briain, and David Baddiel have all taken to the podium in recent years. This year it was James Naughtie. This year's contest was won by agents AP Watt (with a bit of help from some famous authors), with the Times and the Telegraph just behind.
 
In the past five years alone the Quiz has raised £500,00 towards English PEN’s work. If you would like to learn more and become a member, please visit www.englishpen.org/membership.

Now try your hand at the PEN Quiz 2011. Note down your answers and then see how you did by checking out the answers here.
 

ROUND ONE: GENERAL KNOWLEDGE

1.  Which famous British chef says he owes his unusual first name to his parents’ love of a certain motorway service station?
2.  Which politician, when called a fascist by The Guardian, wrote to the paper, as follows: ‘I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers. I am a Nazi.’?
3.  In March and April 2009, who was on the cover of OK! magazine for seven weeks out of eight? On the eighth it was her grieving husband.
4.  Which small burrowing mammal, a member of the mongoose family, was the first mammal other than humans to be recorded actively teaching its young how to eat?
5.  Uranium has the atomic number 92, plutonium has the atomic number 94. Which element has the atomic number 93?
6.  In the USA, what or where was the first lighthouse in the country to use electricity?
7.  The oldest known disease in the world is leprosy. But it is now completely curable, since a vaccine was developed using the only animal, other than humans, that can contract the disease. What animal is that?
8.  In 1964 it was ‘Innocence’. In 2008 it was ‘Novelty’. In 1994 it was ‘Miracles’, and others have included ‘Bias’, ‘Style’, ‘Chaos’, ‘Mercy’, ‘Morality’ and ‘Water’. 2009’s was the last. What?
9.  The lowest point of which African country is higher above sea level than the lowest point of any other country in the world?
10. In the early 1970s, the theatrical costumiers Angels & Bermans created a Santa Claus costume for the then-Prime Minister, Edward Heath. What was unusual about this costume, possible even unique?

ROUND TWO: LITERATURE

1.  Thomas Hardy had Wessex. Emily Brontë had Keeper. Charles Dickens had Turk and Linda. John Steinbeck had Charley, and C S Lewis had Jacksie. (Of course he did.) What am I talking about?
2.  Which crime writer, now deceased, spent much of 1977 in Eritrea, helping to train a company of women guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers?
3.  Who took a job as Librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein at the castle of Dux in Bohemia in 1785, and worked there until his death thirteen years later? He found the job boring and frustrating, but at least it gave him time to write his memoirs.
4.  Whose first novel was published by Faber and Faber in 1954, despite the company’s reader having described it as an ‘absurd and uninteresting fantasy… rubbish and dull… pointless…’? Twenty-nine years later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
5.  Which 1981 novel, ‘a work of living and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches’, according to the Times Literary Supplement, is partly set in the disintegrating, dystopian city of Unthank, which bears more than a slight resemblance to Glasgow?
6.  After a long campaign, it was announced in 2009 that a seaside shelter in Margate had been saved for the nation, primarily because a famous poet had sat there a lot in 1921 and composed his greatest work there. Who?
7.  What does Frankenstein’s monster, in the novel by Mary Shelley, have in common with the Simpsons?
8.  In 1910, the HMS Dreadnought, a vast, state-of-the-art battleship lying off the coast of Weymouth, was visited by a delegation of the Abyssinian royal family, who turned out to be nothing of the kind. They were a group of young London hoaxers, including the son of a judge, an artist and which famous novelist?
9.  Michael Henchard is, of course, the Mayor of Casterbridge in Thomas Hardy’s novel. But he’s not the only one. A second character in the novel becomes the Mayor of Casterbridge. What is his name?
10. Which Frenchman, not previously known for his fiction, published a novel in 2009 about a French President who embarked on an affair with the beautiful, but troubled, ‘Patricia, Princess of Cardiff’?

ROUND THREE: MUSIC

1.  Floral tributes at funerals. Some read ‘DAD’, or ‘MUM’, or ‘GRAN’, or the slightly cheaper ‘NAN’. Whose floral tribute, in April 2010, read ‘CASH FROM CHAOS’?
2.  John Shore was a British musician, Sergeant Trumpeter to the royal court, who had parts specifically written for him by Handel and Purcell. What did he invent in 1711, something that is still used today?
3.  Her first solo album was Writer in 1970. Her third was Music, in late 1971. What was the second?
4.  Which British composer, whose music, according to Felix Aprahamian, was ‘extremely redolent of the soil of this country’, had his first composition published while working as the manager of a grapefruit plantation in Florida?
5.  In the original West End production of Evita, in 1978, Joss Ackland played Juan Peron, Elaine Paige played Eva Peron, and who played Che Guevara?
6.  Which American rock band, whose first six albums have all been nominated for Grammys, named themselves after mysterious aerial phenomena, possibly UFOs, seen by allied pilots during World War II?
7.  Who was the first black artist ever to have a UK number one hit single? It was a long, long time ago.
8.  David Cameron did Desert Island Discs in May 2006. Nick Clegg did it in October last year. What was the only band they both chose?
9.  Which composer applied to the Milan Conservatorium in 1832, but was turned down for lack of musical ability and for being too scruffily dressed? Sixty-seven years later, the Milan Conservatorium asked the same composer if it could rename itself in his honour. He told them where to go.
10. ‘Mack The Knife’, or ‘The Ballad Of Mack The Knife’, if you prefer. Who wrote the original lyrics?

ROUND FOUR: HISTORY

1.  Which infrequent astronomical event is depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry?
2.  Decimalisation of the English currency was first discussed in Parliament in 1849. As a direct consequence of these debates, which coin was introduced?
3.  Henry V had one, as did Charles II, and Henry VIII had three. No other English kings had any. What?
4.  Cleopatra’s father was the 12th, one of her brothers, whom she married, was the 13th, and another of her brothers, whom she also married, was the 14th. What?
5.  The Ten Bells, a Victorian pub on the corner of Commercial Street in Spitalfields, changed its name in 1976. But after a long campaign against this new name, the owners reverted to the old name in 1988. What was The Ten Bells called for those twelve years?
6.  Who was the last UK Prime Minister who never travelled in an aeroplane?
7.  Adolf Hitler attended the Realschule in Linz in 1904-5. Which Austrian philosopher, who outlived him, was in the same year as him, although not, it’s thought, in the same class?
8.  Who was the last British (or English) monarch who, when he or she came to the throne, was older than the person he or she succeeded?
9.  The Rum Rebellion of 1808 is the only successful armed takeover of government in Australia’s history. The New South Wales Corps deposed the Governor of the state and declared martial law. Who was the deposed Governor?
10.  Henry Allingham, who died in 2009 at the age of 113, was the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland. Among many obituaries was one in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, which recorded that ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, he was the last person alive to have seen whom bat?

ROUND FIVE: FILM & TV

1.  Whose first words to her future husband when she met him at Granada TV were ‘Hello, I’m your mummy’?
2.  With one or two exceptions, the bad guys in the Star Wars films, those who have embraced the Dark Side of the Force, all use the same colour light sabres. What colour?
3.  In the BBC’s 1999 TV adaptation of David Copperfield, Bob Hoskins played Mr Micawber and Maggie Smith played Betsey Trotwood. Who played David Copperfield as a boy?
4.  Which 2011 film was reviewed in The Spectator under the headline ‘Farewell to Arm’?
5.  Take a 1986 film starring Bob Hoskins. Add the word ‘Smile’ and you get a 2003 film starring Julia Roberts. What was the original?
6.  In Inspector Morse, Morse’s assistant was Lewis. In Lewis, Lewis’s assistant is who?
7.  Only two non-Pythons ever gained writing credits on the Monty Python TV series. One was Neil Innes, who wrote several songs for the last series. Who was the other?
(He wrote for a while with Graham Chapman and has one credit on the last series.)
8.  Who, in 1978, became the only actress ever to win an Oscar for playing an actress nominated for an Oscar?
9.  His last film, in the late 1980s, was supposed to be an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. He had engaged Christopher Hampton to help him modernise the story and ‘make the audience sit up with surprise’. In 1991, six weeks before shooting was due to begin, he died. Who?
10. Almost every film on the IMDb - the Internet Movie Database - is rated out of ten points. Which 1984 film has a current rating of 8.0 out of 11?
 

Marcus Berkmann set the PEN quiz is a writer, journalist and part-time quizmaster. His latest book is Brain Men. For details see www.brainmen.co.uk. Pictures courtesy of Robert Sharp/English PEN.