The Week’s Christmas quiz: looking back on 2021

1. Philip Pirrip is a character in which Dickens novel? And in which would you find Mrs Jellyby?

2. In what year was the first Harry Potter book published?

3. In what US state is To Kill a Mocking Bird set?

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4. In which books would you find the following lines: a) “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” b) “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” c) “[She] was very vain and liked to look her best. Indeed, she was quite sure that she never looked anything else.” d) “Tomorrow I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”

5. a) If you were looking enviously at East Egg, which novel would you be in? b) Which beady-eyed character might you meet in the village of St Mary Mead? c) In books by which author would you be transported to Ruritania?

6. During which wars are the following novels set: a) Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie b) MASH, by Richard Hooker c) Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls?

7. “Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.” Which play contains this line?

8. In which novels would you find the following unreliable narrators: a) Patrick Bateman b) Humbert Humbert c) Amy Dunne?

9. Which author gave the following wise advice: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose”?

10. Which poet took the road less travelled?

11. Sally Rooney produced her highly anticipated third novel this year. What was it called?

12. William, Henry, Douglas and Ginger are all members of which fictional gang?

13. What term describes a style of postimpressionist painting characterised by bold and flat forms separated by dark contours?

14. Which avant-garde, anti-war, antibourgeois artistic movement developed in Zurich during the First World War?

1. Great Expectations, Bleak House, 2. 1997, 3. Alabama, 4. a) Nineteen Eighty-Four b) The Picture of Dorian Grey, c) Mary Poppins, d) Gone with the Wind, 5. a) The Great Gatsby, b) Miss Marple, c) Anthony Hope, 6. a) Biafran War, b) Korean War, c) Spanish Civil War, 7. Twelfth Night, 8. a) American Psycho, b) Lolita, c) Gone Girl, 9. Dr Seuss, 10. Robert Frost, 11. Beautiful World, Where are You, 12. The Outlaws, 13. Cloisonnism, 14. Dadaism