| 1) Which philosopher, appointed to a Chair of Classical Philology at the tender age of 24, was later responsible for the idea of the Superman and ended his days in complete mental and physical paralysis? |
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Soren Kierkegaard
Friedrich Nietzsche
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Immanuel Kant
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| 2) Which 'exceptional and courageous woman' made a habit of inciting men to kill each other but remained faithful to her beardless husband and was murdered with him saying 'I have promised him that we would share the same fate'? |
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Bergthora in Njal's Saga
Thora in King Harald's Saga
Yrsa in The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki
Katla in Eyrbyggja Saga
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| 3) According to Plutarch, whose debauched retirement with Roscius the comedian, Sorex the ballet dancer and the ageing female impersonator Metrobius ended when 'his whole fles became corrupted and turned into worms'? |
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Sulla Felix
Marius the Epicurean
Philip of Macedon
Demetrius the Besieger
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| 4) Which Mancunian journalist and reverent admirer of Wordsworth wrote a series of confessions principally about drug addiction and ended his days eking out a precarious living in Edinburgh? |
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George Gordon
John Keats
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Thomas de Quincey
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| 5) Which novel by Thomas Hardy relates the attempts, thwarted by poverty, of a divorced stonemason to enter university, and ends in tragedy? |
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
Jude the Obscure
The Return of the Native
The Well-Beloved
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| 6) Which talented contemporary of England's greatest playwright, rumoured to be an Elizabethan secret agent, was arrested for blasphemy and stabbed to death in a tavern brawl a month later, aged only 29? |
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Ben Jonson
Francis Beaumont
Thomas Middleton
Christopher Marlowe
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| 7) What spectre hangs over the heroine of a play by Henrik Ibsen which was labelled 'putrid', 'naked loathsomeness' and 'an open sewer' by critics when it was first staged in London, and what is the name of the play? |
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Her father's profligacy in Brand
Her uncle's lechery in When We Dead Wake
Her husband's syphilis in Ghosts
Her first love's infidelity in The Public Enemy
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| 8) In what part of the underworld is this unfortunate condemned forever to immobility, with cool, delicious water just out of reach below his chin and plump, juicy grapes just too far above his head, and what is his name? |
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Typhon in Phlegethon
Sisyphus in Acheron
Tantalus in Tartaros
Cronos in Elysium
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| 9) In Dante's Inferno, which sinners are 'stung again and again by the hornets and the wasps? |
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The lustful
The wrathful
The undecided
The treacherous
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| 10) Not only did this famous poet lose the love of his life by disobeying the deities of the underworld, but to cap it all, he had his head torn off and hurled into a river. Who or what did this to him? |
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An enraged dragon
A beast with the heads of a lion, a goat and a snake
An ogre with three bodies
A band of drunken women
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