Christmas Quiz 2014

Greetings from the Isle of Jura whence the sixth (!) edition of this blogs’ annual Christmas Quiz comes to you wherever you may be cloistered this festive season. As always you can enlist Google to assist you; as always doing so seems pointless and contrary to the spirit of the occasion. But it’s up to you. Answers will, as is traditional, be published at some as-yet-to-be-determined date. However you can email me (alexmassie-at-gmail-dot-com) or badger me on Twitter for hints and/or the complete set of answers and, internet connections and time permitting, I’ll do my relative best to help you.

1. Who are served, so to speak, by an Ulster Unionist, Carthage’s greatest foe and a Warwickshire cricketer?

2. What links a royal motto with Odysseus and Jules Verne?

3. What, collectively, are a Dulwich College alumnus, Jacob’s wife, Apollo’s grandmother, a Scottish county, a White House intern and a juvenile marsupial?

4. Virginia boasts eight and Ohio seven but California, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Connecticut only one apiece. What and can you identify the singletons?

5. With which letter would you associate the School of Science, a Scottish river and an author unhappy with Kansas?

6. Stockholm is 67, Paris is 71 and Copenhagen is 72. How so?

7. Where, far from home, would you find a first sight of England, a chivalrous Elizabethan, a former Tory leader’s constituency and a Lincolnshire town?

8. In what sense was a Downing Street transition thunderously replicated on Fleet Street 20 years later?

9. In what font should you find an Eco hero and one whose boots were stolen from a London hotel?

10. EHM, QPQ, IOH, UNU, KPD and KTW are reversed. Numbers would be inappropriate. Why?

11. Why might you reckon a dashing American admiral, one of the first crusaders, a Princetonian president, an infantryman’s spear and a Pulitzer-winning African-American novelist all comically hopeless?

12. The first died at 12, the second at just 4, the third at 70 and the fourth at 12. The fifth is still going at 56. What?

13. If a mischievous English schoolboy, a New Zealand city and an Australian tennis champion are three of four, who is the fourth and how are they up to no good?

14. Where will you find The Peace, Saint James, Good Winds and Mountain View?

15. If the Spartans take on the Trojans at the Coliseum, what’s going on?

16. In order: Poisoned, stabbed, drowned, executed (2), poisoned, stabbed and poisoned (3). Who?

17. What was yellow in Paris but is still pink in Milan?

18. What links a Staten Island Scot, a Young Bosnian and an American essayist’s “embattled farmers”?

19. Clarke was the first and Plunkett the seventh and last. Who were the other five and what happened to them?

20. What are Edinburgh, Dover, Portsmouth, Avonmouth, Holyhead and Carlisle?