The Colman Getty PEN Quiz Questions
Round 1: Sporting Chance
1: Which novel contains the line: "These are the small pleasures at the start of a Saturday morning—the promise of coffee, and this faded squash kit."
2: Name the monstrous head teacher in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, who formerly competed at the Olympics in the hammer throw and shotput?
3: In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (Act 2, Scene 5) what game does Cleopatra suggest her attendants play?
4: In which Don DeLillo novel are scenes threaded together by a baseball being passed from character to character?
5: In which E .M Forster novel does Gerald die ‘broken up on the football field’?
6: In Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea what kind of fish does the old fisherman hunt and then get pulled along by for 2 days and 2 nights?
7: Which comic author’s golfing character says the words, ‘When I played, I never lost my temper. Sometimes, it is true, I may, after missing a shot, have broken my club across my knees; but I did it in a calm and judicial spirit’?
8: Which of Milton’s characters, asked to perform a feat of strength, complains ‘Have they not sword players and every sort of gymnic artists, wrestlers, riders, runners, jugglers and dancers’?
9: In Philip Roth’s Amercian Pastoral what kind of ball is described as weighing very little, ‘yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn’t have been far from his mind.’
10: Which literary anti-hero allegedly performs the first ever cricket Hat Trick at Lords in 1843?
Round 2: History Boys and Girls
1: Which play does the following line come from: ‘History. It’s just one bloody thing after another’?
2: Place the following novels in order of their publication with the earliest first:
a) Dr Seuss, Green Eggs & Ham
b) Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
c) Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3: Which newspaper did Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward work for when they uncovered the Watergate scandal?
4: Which media tycoon’s daughter, kidnapped in 1974, soon after joined her kidnappers in robbing a bank?
5: In which London department store did the world’s first public demonstration of television take place in 1925?
6: In 1983 Japanese artist, Tadahiko Ogawa, made a copy of which famous painting completely out of toast?
7: Which American President was the first to ride in an automobile, first to fly in an aeroplane and first to go underwater in a submarine?
8: Who owned a cat called Wendell, a horse called Rising Sun, and a chimpanzee called Scatter?
9: What year saw the publication of Lytton Strachey’s royal biography Queen Victoria, the release of Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film The Kid and the founding of PEN?
10: Which British Prime Minister once said ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’?
Round 3: Celebrity Gossip
1: Jade Goody, who thought that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa, appeared on a celebrity edition of Mastermind in 2006. Which TV programme did she choose as her specialist subject?
2: Which singer caused controversy by imitating a pill-popping nun in 2006?
3: Which comedian recently starred in TV adaptations of Bleak House and A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
4: The recent film The Devil Wears Prada bases Meryl Streep’s character on which real life editor?
5: What item of hand luggage gave its name to Woody Allan and Mia Farrow’s son?
6: Separated couple Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin recently hit the news when she compared him to which dictator?
7: Which supermodel was recently in the headlines for allegedly attacking her drugs counsellor?
8: In October 2006 Fox News reported that Scarlet Johansson had signed a record deal in which she will sing cover versions of which male, American singer-songwriter?
9: Which talk show host did TomKat upset by not inviting her to their wedding, especially since her couch was used by Tom to bouncingly declare his love?
10: What role is Casino Royale star Daniel Craig set to play in the forthcoming film of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and which Hollywood actress will co-star as Mrs Coulter?
Round 4: Cover Stories
Click here to view the sections from book covers guests were asked to identify.
Round 5: Easy Listening?
A short musical clip was played before each question.
1: She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge – but where did Jarvis Cocker's over-privileged friend study sculpture?
2: Jimi Hendrix's cover of All Along the Watchtower features on the soundtrack of Withnail and I. What does Withnail demand when he and 'I' arrive in a quiet teashop?
3: In 1936, Pravda published an editorial called Muddle Instead of Music, after Stalin was horrified by what he saw at the opera. The official delegation swept out before the final scene and they promptly had the opera closed down – but what was it?
4: The sci-fi author Philip K Dick peppers his novels with references to this sixteenth-century musician, and Elvis Costello has even recorded a cover version of one of his songs. Sting, too, is a fan. Who is the musician and what is his instrument?
5: What is the name of the Brazilian musical movement that arrived after bossa nova but enjoyed only a few years of freedom before its leaders, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were jailed and then exiled by the military government in 1969?
6: This political poem was written in the 1930s by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx. It was set to music and sung at teachers' unions meetings before being made popular by Billie Holiday, whose record label refused to release it. What is the song?
7: On what Russian novel is the Franz Ferdinand song 'Love and Destroy' based?
8: Lily Allen's debut album was missing one of her best songs, 'Nan You're A Window Shopper', as her record label couldn't get sample clearance on the record she had quoted from. Which gun-scarred American rapper wrote about window-shopping first?
9: More commonly known as Freddie Mercury, he was born Farrokh Bulsara to his Zoroastrian parents on which African island?
10: Which rock star insisted on flying in specially from Dublin to record his original line from 'Do They Know it's Christmas' on the 20th anniversary recording of the song in 2004 - and what was the line?
Round 6: Forbidden Fruits
1: Bloomsday, which celebrates the life of James Joyce and the events in his novel Ulysses, only fully legalised in the UK in 1936, takes place on what date?
2: China banned Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1931 because its animals could talk. Which of the book’s animal characters is widely thought to represent the author and his stammering pronunciation of his own, real, name?
3: Which Faber editor’s rejection letter to George Orwell in 1944 queried his satire of the Russian Revolution, saying "After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm… what is needed is not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."?
4: Which famous cookbook, still illegal in some countries, was published in 1970?
5: The Diary of Anne Frank was considered worth banning by members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee because it was a "real downer". How old was Anne when she began the diary?
6: Which rock star told Leni Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will which was banned in Germany after the Second World War, that he had watched the film at least 15 times?
7: China banned Brokeback Mountain and Memoirs of a Geisha in 2006. Which film has the same director as the former and the same leading lady as the latter?
8: Which 1992 Disney film was forced to censor one of the verses of its opening song following protests from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee?
9: Finish the following quote from a song which was briefly banned on BBC Radio in the 1940s for having ‘smutty lyrics’: ‘The blushing bride she looks divine, The bridegroom he is doing fine, I'd rather have his job than mine…’
10: Between 1788 and 1820 performances of Shakespeare’s King Lear were prohibited, out of respect for King George III who had regular bouts of insanity. Which actor plays King George in the 1994 film written by Alan Bennett?