Have yourself a merry little quiz-mas
’TIS the season to be jolly, and as there’s nothing less jolly than enforced jolliness, you need Abject Quizzery: The Utterly Depressing Quiz Book (Old Street £12.99).
With its cover quote ‘ No fun for all the family’, this hilarious book poses questions on (supposedly) depressing topics such as death, disaster and crime. The link between a group of famous tyrants, for instance, is that they were all honoured guests at Buckingham Palace. Apparently, the Shah of Persia, on his 1873 visit, refused the use of the royal lavatories and went wherever the spirit moved him.
The Round Britain Quiz Book (BBC £12.99) contains 250 delightfully cryptic questions from the long-running Radio 4 programme. For example: ‘In a sentence, can you say: what a revered England goalie does to protect his earnings; how a stellar guitarist’s manager responds to a request for his client; and how a Yorkshire announcer
preserves his vegetables?’ (The answers are at the end of this round-up.)
Title of Most Fiendish Book goes to Conundrum: Crack The Ultimate Cipher
Challenge (Icon £8.99) by the ever-excellent science writer Brian Clegg. Each answer provides a character, number or word, all of which build up into another answer, which you then have to enter online, and if you’re the first person to do so, you’ll be selected as the next head of MI6. (I may have got bits of that wrong.)
I felt rather chuffed at getting the first question right: ‘decrypt the title of this well-known novel: “YMJ hFYhMJW NS YMJ WdJ”.’ (For each letter count back five letters in the alphabet, so Y becomes T, etc.) After that things went progressively less well. Many quiz books are really just standard puzzles — wordsearches, sudokus and the like — ‘themed’ to the title in question. For instance, The Classic FM Puzzle Book (Octopus £12.99) has a ‘sudo-key’ which replaces the numbers 1 to 9 with the letters A to G plus ‘ major’ and ‘minor’.
But the book is no less entertaining for that, and also contains some fascinating stories, such as the one about composer Jean-Baptiste lully stabbing himself in the foot with his conducting staff while beating time. (he died from gangrene.)
Similarly in Sinclair McKay’s The Scotland Yard Puzzle Book (Headline, £12.99), we learn that the first old Bailey case to use fingerprints in evidence (1902) concerned the theft of billiard balls. other books really do stick to their theme, providing great entertainment and information. James Walton’s The Penguin Book Quiz (Penguin £9.99) reveals that Allen lane, founder of the publishing house in question, had a guard of honour at his wedding formed by two lines of cardboard penguins.
The Movie Quiz Book (Laurence King £12.99) quotes liberace: ‘I’ve done my bit for motion pictures. I’ve stopped making them.’ And The Vintage Geek Quiz Book (September £12.99) allows Marshall Julius to indulge his love of all things nerdy, from doctor Who via James Bond to The Simpsons.
ANSWERS: Round Britain Quiz: Their names are all sentences: Gordon Banks, Brian May (‘stellar’ because he has a PhD in space studies) and the BBC newsreader Wilfred Pickles. Conundrum: The Catcher In The Rye.