Quiz 22

Question 1

When Sir Alistair Pilkington developed the so-called Float Process for the manufacture of glass, he used a molten bath or river of which metal to float the glass on?

Answer 1

Tin

Question 2

Which 1760s novel by Horace Walpole is often credited with setting the fashion for supernatural romance?

Answer 2

The Castle of Otranto

Question 3

Kashrut is that body of Jewish law relating to what in particular?

Answer 3

Dietary law

Question 4

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Murders In The Rue Morgue, the violent murders of an old woman and her daughter turn out to have been committed by what kind of creature?

Answer 4

Orangutan

Question 5

Dippermouth was an early nickname for which jazz musician who died in 1971?

Answer 5

Louis Armstrong

Question 6

Which golfer in 1988 became the first Briton to win the US Masters?

Answer 6

Sandy Lyle

Question 7

Which city was proclaimed the first capital of the united kingdom of Italy in 1861?

Answer 7

Turin

Question 8

Very soon after the English Civil War, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes published his most famous work, a treatise in which he memorably described the life of men as “nasty, brutish and short”. Under what title did that treatise appear?

Answer 8

Leviathan

Question 9

The bestockinged leg that appears in the foreground on posters for the 1967 film The Graduate was not, in fact, that of lead Anne Bancroft, but belonged to a model and actress who was later to star as Sue Ellen in the hit TV series Dallas. Can you name her?

Answer 9

Linda Gray

Question 10

The Paris-based American photographer Emmanuel Rudnitsky, who died in 1976, was known professionally by which name?

Answer 10

Man Ray

Question 11

In Freudian psychoanalysis, which component of the human personality is responsible for ethics and self-imposed standards of behaviour?

Answer 11

Super-ego

Question 12

Which Labour MP, born near Halesworth in Suffolk and subsequently a leader of his party, resigned his seat in 1912 to draw attention to the imprisonment of suffragettes?

Answer 12

George Lansbury

Question 13

An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise is one of the most popular orchestral pieces of which British composer who made his home in Orkney for over forty years and died in 2016?

Answer 13

Peter Maxwell Davies

Question 14

Betsy Ross, who lived between 1752 and 1836, is often credited with making the first what?

Answer 14

Stars and Stripes flag

Question 15

Lepenski Vir, now submerged by an artificial lake, is the site of Mesolithic farming settlement in a valley of which European river?

Answer 15

Danube

Question 16

Occurring throughout Western Europe, what kind of creature is a Devil’s coach horse?

Answer 16

Beetle

Question 17

Who was the first unseeded player to win the Wimbledon Men’s Singles title?

Answer 17

Boris Becker

Question 18

The elaborate buildings originally constructed in London for the Franco-British exhibition on 1908 went by a collective nickname that’s still in use, although the buildings are long gone. It’s also remembered as the name of a sporting venue. What name is this?

Answer 18

White City

Question 19

What was once described by George Orwell as something halfway between a girls school and a lunatic asylum?

Answer 19

BBC

Question 20

Which British rock group recorded a 1972 album with a cover depicting the model Amanda Lear taking a black panther for a walk?

Answer 20

Roxy Music

Question 21

In medicine, Naegele’s Rule is a method used to estimate the probable date of the onset of which natural process?

Answer 21

Birth

Question 22

Which 18th Century novelist’s eponymous heroes include Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker?

Answer 22

Tobias Smollett

Question 23

Which English painter, a member of the Camden Town Group, was briefly an actor with Sir Henry Irving’s company and has also been suggested, most recently by Patricia Cornwell, as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888?

Answer 23

Walter Sickert

Question 24

In 991AD, Viking Raiders defeated an Anglo-Saxon army at Maldon, on the shores of the Blackwater estuary, in which modern English county?

Answer 24

Essex

Question 25

The so-called Junius Pamphlet was a letter written in 1916 by which Polish-born Spartacist during a period of imprisonment?

Answer 25

Rosa Luxemburg

Question 26

The three stars named Delta, Epsilon and Zeta, fairly equally spaced in a straight line, together form which familiar feature of the night sky?

Answer 26

Orion’s belt

Question 27

The actor Peter O’Toole portrayed the same English king in two very different films, a few years apart, in the 1960s. Which King?

Answer 27

Henry II

Question 28

Which eponymous Virginia Woolf character changes sex part-way through a novel?

Answer 28

Orlando

Question 29

Sometimes used in English sentences before a named individual or body, to indicate a respectful contradiction, which Latin word of four letters mean in deference to or with due respect?

Answer 29

Pace

Question 30

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, what absurd dispute was at the root of a long running war between the nations of Lilliput and Blefuscu?

Answer 30

Which end to open a boiled egg

Question 31

In the Bible, who was the third of Noah’s sons after Shem and Ham?

Answer 31

Japheth

Question 32

In physics, what name is given to the observable effect whereby the course of a moving object appears to be deflected as a result of the rotation of the Earth?

Answer 32

Coriolis Effect

Question 33

What is the national epic poem of Finland?

Answer 33

Kalevala

Question 34

What commonly used religious word derives directly from the Greek adjective meaning anointed?

Answer 34

Christ

Question 35

A Childhood At Green Hedges by Imogen Smallwood is an account of the author’s childhood as the youngest daughter of which children’s writer?

Answer 35

Enid Blyton

Question 36

Which English scientist developed the method of classifying fingerprints by patterns, a system improved by the London Police Commissioner Sir Henry R Henry, that was introduced at Scotland Yard in 1901?

Answer 36

Francis Galton

Question 37

In a mix-up that was reported around the world, the Academy Award ceremony of 2017 was memorable for the wrong movie, La La Land, being announced as winner of the Best Picture Oscar. Which film actually won?

Answer 37

Moonlight

Question 38

On which temperature scale, proposed in 1730, is the freezing point of water set at 0 degrees and its boiling and its boiling point at 80?

Answer 38

Reaumur

Question 39

Titus Groan, the first novel in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, was first published in 1946. The other two novels followed in the 1950s. Can you name both of those other two?

Answer 39

Gormenghast and Titus Alone

Question 40

According to a 2011 biography by his daughter Clare, Mervyn Peake was commissioned to create the logo for which publishing firm, best known for their paperbacks?

Answer 40

Pan