Paul Bajoria - The Round Britain Quiz Book

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We start with ten questions that we hope wont prove too tricky, and which should help you get used to the way typical Round Britain Quiz questions work.

Why might Atticuss daughter, Jay Silverheelss horse and Haydn Dimmock be drawn to the highest point in the Peak District?

CLUES

- Atticuss daughter is a fictional character but Jay Silverheels and Haydn Dimmock were real people.

- The highest point in the Peak District was the scene of a famous trespassing incident.

If Edinburghs a bit hard of hearing and Inverness gives you the needle, why is Coventry proud of its achievements? And whats saucy about Hemel Hempstead?

CLUES

- You need to address yourself particularly carefully to the wording of this question.

- By the same logic, Maidstone is self-centred and Bristol talks complete rubbish.

Atticuss daughter, the child narrator of the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird, is Jean Louise Finch, known throughout as Scout . Mary Badham played her in the 1962 movie (which starred Gregory Peck as Atticus).

Jay Silverheels played Tonto in the long-running US television series The Lone Ranger; Tontos horse was called Scout (the Lone Rangers was Silver).

Haydn Dimmock, childrens writer and editor, edited the boys magazine The Scout between 1915 and 1954. He invented the famous Boy Scout tradition of Bob-a-Job Week, and promulgated the idea in the magazine.

They may all be drawn to the highest point in the Peak District, which is the summit of Kinder Scout (636 m). Kinder Scout was the scene of a mass trespass in April 1932, by people protesting at being excluded from private land in areas of natural beauty. Its often seen as having given important momentum to the National Park movement.

Edinburgh is EH , which makes it a bit deaf (eh?).

Inverness is IV (intra-venous).

Coventry is proud of its CV.

Hemel Hempsteads postcode is HP (as in HP sauce).

Why would Steve Bell and Lindsay Anderson feel at home on an island fortress off Marseille?

CLUES

- The island fortress is the scene of one of the most daring escapes in fiction.

- Rudyard Kipling and Telly Savalas might feel at home there too.

Which Scottish church has been linked, at various times, with a self-mutilating painter, a young man with a horn and a crucified rebel slave?

CLUES

- The church is generic, rather than specific.

- The painter, the young man and the slave were all real people, immortalized in a particular way.

The island of If , off the French Mediterranean coast near Marseille, has a castle dating from the 1520s which was featured as the place of imprisonment of the hero Edmond Dants in the Alexandre Dumas novel The Count of Monte Cristo (18445). In one of literatures all-time classic pieces of derring-do, Dants makes his escape from the chteau dIf after 14 years incarceration, by taking the place of a dead fellow prisoner, being sewn into a burial shroud and tipped over the wall into the sea.

The British director Lindsay Andersons If (1968) was the first film in an increasingly surreal anti-establishment trilogy, starring Malcolm McDowell as Mick Travis. In it, he and a group of classmates enact their fantasy of causing mayhem at their hidebound public school by taking up positions on the battlements and machine-gunning half of the staff and pupils to death. The other two films in the sequence are O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982).

Since 1981 Steve Bell (b.1951) has drawn and written the savagely satirical Guardian strip cartoon If

Kirk Douglass performance as Vincent van Gogh (185390) in Lust for Life (dir. Vincente Minelli, 1956) is regarded as one of the finest of his career; he went so far as to take extensive painting lessons to prepare for the role. Van Gogh cut his own ear off on 23 December 1888 in an incident the exact circumstances of which are still disputed.

Bix Beiderbecke (190331), the pioneering white cornet player who became one of the jazz lifestyles earliest and most notorious casualties, inspired Dorothy Bakers novel Young Man with a Horn, which was filmed in 1950 by Michael Curtiz. In the film, Kirk Douglass supposed horn playing was dubbed by Harry James.

The real historical Spartacus , the slave born in Thrace who was trained at gladiatorial school in order to make him marketable to coliseum owners as an (expendable) attraction in the amphitheatre, led a rebellion of some 70,000 slaves against the Roman Empire in c.73 bc . He was actually hacked to death in battle rather than crucified, as he is in the Stanley Kubrick movie of 1960. Kirk Douglas starred alongside Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis and Charles Laughton; Jean Simmons played his wife Varinia.

Can you place in order Dorothys aunt, Arthurs foster brother, Dakotas sister and Garrulus glandarius ?

CLUES

- By Dorothy in this case we mean the character in The Wizard of Oz.

- These are single-syllable answers.

If 509 is a German painter and 601 is a senior police officer, can you explain why 1009 is a cowboy and 1200 an entire cricket team?

CLUES

- The painter and the cowboy have surnames that rhyme.

- 501 would be a slightly less senior police officer.

Dorothys aunt in The Wizard of Oz (1939) is Aunt Em . After Dorothy runs away from home, early in the film, she is shown a crystal ball by the fortune teller Professor Marvel, in which Aunt Em is apparently dying of a broken heart, prompting her to rush home. In the movie Aunt Em was played by Clara Blandick.

Dakotas sister is a reference to Elle Fanning (b.1998), the actor sister of Dakota Fanning, whose most notable roles have included 11-year-old Cleo in Somewhere and Alicia in The Beguiled, both directed by Sofia Coppola.

Sir Kay , in many re-tellings of the legend of King Arthur including T. H. Whites classic The Once and Future King and the animated Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, is the foster brother of Arthur. He becomes a Knight of the Round Table and Arthurs steward.

Garrulus glandarius is the bird known as the jay , widespread across Europe and Asia. (The bird known as a jaybird or blue jay in North America is an entirely different species.)

The painter is Otto DIX (Roman numerals for 509), twentieth-century German realist artist bitterly opposed to, and suppressed by, Nazism.

By the same logic, 601 in Roman numerals gives us DCI a senior police rank.

So 1009 is MIX , giving us the screen cowboy Tom Mix (Thomas Hezekiah Mix, 18801940), Hollywoods first superstar of Westerns.