Verbals
In 2022, who said:
1. Them’s the breaks.
2. I know that we will deliver, we will deliver, we will deliver.
3. Dear, oh dear.
4. Excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace.
5. For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.
6. I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood.
7. The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast.
8. Dio, Patria e Famiglia non è uno slogan politico ma il più bel manifesto d’amore.
9. The jury’s still out.
10. Nous aussi on t’emmerde.
Royal prerogatives
In 2022:
1. For her Platinum Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth was filmed taking a sandwich out of her handbag. Who was her guest for tea at the time?
2. In July to whom did Queen Elizabeth award the George Cross in a ceremony at Windsor Castle?
3. Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, declared: ‘I should say we aspire at some point to become a republic.’ Which royal couple was visiting at the time?
4. In June, the Duchess of Cornwall and Sir Tony Blair were installed at Windsor as what?
5. Which royal duchess said in a magazine interview that she had been told by a South African actor: ‘When you married into this family, we rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison’?
6. At the lying-in-state of Queen Elizabeth, the coffin was guarded by members of the Gentlemen at Arms, the Yeoman of the Guard and which other ceremonial unit of the Sovereign’s Bodyguard, with eagle feathers in the caps?
7. At the state funeral for Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey, Psalm 23, ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’, was sung, as it had been at her wedding, to the tune known as what?
8. At the committal service for Queen Elizabeth in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, the orb and sceptre were delivered into the hands of the Dean of Windsor by the Serjeant at Arms. Which red-coated officer of the royal household delivered the Imperial State Crown?
9. Misuzulu ka Zwelithini was crowned king of whom, in succession to King Goodwill?
10. Princess Märtha Louise, whose boyfriend says he is a shaman, relinquished her royal duties in which country, to focus on her alternative medicine business?
European flowers
1. The Volga, the longest river in Europe, flows into which sea?
2. Which is the longest European river flowing into the Mediterranean?
3. The Rhine forms a border of Switzerland with Liechtenstein, Germany and which other country?
4. The 1,500-mile river Ural forms a border between Russia and which other country?
5. The 1,770-mile Danube flows through four capital cities: Bratislava, Vienna, Belgrade and which other?
6. The Romans called Italy’s longest river the Padus. What is it called now?
7. Europe’s fourth-longest river, the Dnieper or Dnipro, at about 1,368 miles, runs from Russia to Ukraine, through which other country?
8. The five rivers of the Greek underworld were the Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus and which other?
9. ‘Mole digs her selfe a path, by working day and night / (According to her name, to shew her nature right) / And underneath the Earth, for three miles space doth creep,’ wrote the 17th-century author of the 15,000-line Poly-Olbion, celebrating the topography of England. Who was he?
10. Which poet concluded his poem on the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 with the lines: ‘For the stronger we our houses do build,/ The less chance we have of being killed.’
Initial difficulties
What names do the initials stand for?
1. G.K. Chesterton
2. T.S. Eliot
3. J.M.W. Turner
4. A.W.N. Pugin
5. C.S. Lewis
6. W.S. Gilbert
7. T.E. Lawrence
8. E.F. Benson
9. H.G. Wells
10. G.F. Bodley
Exits
In 2022:
1. Who died aged 94, remembered as Virgil Tibbs?
2. Which travel writer got off her bike, aged 90?
3. Nine times a Derby winner, which jockey made it to the winners’ enclosure for the last time aged 86?
4. Who was the last head of the Soviet Union, who died aged 91?
5. Name the inventor of the swingometer, who died aged 98.
6. Who sang ‘You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain’ and died aged 87?
7. Who brought viewers 25 years of ‘Your starter for ten’, from 1962 to 1987, and died aged 87?
8. Who ‘like a bat out of hell’ was gone when the morning came, aged 74?
9. Who was the single-name composer of the score to Chariots of Fire (1981) and died aged 79?
10. Who played Dot Cotton in EastEnders between 1985 and 2020 and died aged 95?
Herald angels
Match the writers to the extracts: Charles Dickens; E.M. Forster; James Woodforde; George and Weedon Grossmith; Flora Thompson; William Thackeray; Daisy Ashford; Coventry Patmore; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; John Ruskin.
1. ‘I am anxious to hear heaven’s choice. You arouse my curiosity. Is my sister-in-law to marry an angel?’
‘Mr Herriton, don’t – please, Mr Herriton – a dentist. His father’s a dentist.’
Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain. He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion. A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty!
2. Mr Claypole went on, without halting, until he arrived at the Angel at Islington, where he wisely judged, from the crowd of passengers and numbers of vehicles, that London began in earnest. Just pausing to observe which appeared the most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he crossed into St John’s Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray’s Inn Lane and Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst that improvement has left in the midst of London.
3. Robert Biggen for stealing Potatoes was this afternoon whipp’d thro’ the streets of Cary by the Hangman at the end of a Cart. He was whipped from the George Inn to the Angel, from thence back thro’ the street to the Royal Oak in South Cary and so back to the George Inn. He being an old offender there was a Collection of 0. 17. 6 given to the Hangman to do him justice. But it was not much for all that – the Hangman was an old Man and a most villainous looking Fellow indeed. For my Part I would not contribute one Farthing to it.
4. We had great difficulty in getting a cabman to take us to Holloway. After waiting a bit, a man said he would drive us, anyhow, as far as ‘The Angel,’ at Islington, and we could easily get another cab from there. It was a tedious journey; the rain was beating against the windows and trickling down the inside of the cab. When we arrived at ‘The Angel’ the horse seemed tired out. Carrie got out and ran into a doorway, and when I came to pay, to my absolute horror I remembered I had no money, nor had Carrie. I explained to the cabman how we were situated. Never in my life have I ever been so insulted; the cabman, who was a rough bully and to my thinking not sober, called me every name he could lay his tongue to.
5. Her soft voice, singularly heard
Beside me, in her chant, withstood
The roar of voices, like a bird
Sole warbling in a windy wood;
And, when we knelt, she seem’d to be
An angel teaching me to pray.
6. Then they ordered the most splendid refreshments they had tea and coffie and sparkling wines to drink also a lovly wedding cake of great height with a sugar angel at the top holding a sword made of almond paste.
7. One day, being invited to dinner with Count Picon, Governor of Savoy, who was very religious, he arrived before it was ready, and found his excellency busy with his devotions, who proposed to him the same employment; not knowing how to refuse, he knelt down with a frightful grimace, but had hardlyrecited two Ave-Marias, when, not being able to contain himself any longer, he rose hastily, snatched his hat and cane, and without speaking a word, was making toward the door; Count Picon ran after him, crying, ‘Monsieur Grossi! Monsieur Grossi! Stop, there’s a most excellent ortolan on the spit for you.’ ‘Monsieur le Count,’ replied the other, turning his head, ‘though you should give me a roasted angel, I would not stay.’
8. When Lady Jane was telling stories to the children, who clustered about her knees (little Rawdon into the bargain, who was very fond of her), and Becky came into the room, sneering with green scornful eyes, poor Lady Jane grew silent under those baleful glances. Her simple little fancies shrank away tremulously, as fairies in the story-books, before a superior bad angel.
9. Miss Andrews, the eldest sister of the ‘Angel in the House’, was an extremely beautiful girl of seventeen; she sang ‘Tambourgi, Tambourgi’ with great spirit and a rich voice, went at blackberry time on rambles with us at the Norwood Spa, and made me feel generally that there was something in girls that I did not understand, and that was curiously agreeable.
10. The roadside banks were covered with the tiny spring flowers she loved, stitchwort and celandine and whole sheets of speedwell, which Laura knew as angel’s eyes.
Click here for the answers
Comments