British Reference Books

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  

1. One of the earliest reference books still in regular use is Cruden’s "Concordance". It will help you to find your way around which text? The Bible (King James Version) Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Virgil’s Aeneid

2. In one of my civil service jobs, my tasks included looking at the daily editions of Hansard. What is reported in Hansard? parliamentary debates grants of patents bankruptcies legal judgements

3. What can be found in the reference book that bears the name of Burke? genealogy of peers, baronets and knights genealogy and form of racehorses a bibliography of works on Shakespeare origins of English proverbs and sayings

4. I’ve lost touch with an old friend, and I wonder where he is now, so I look for his details in Crockford’s. What is my friend’s profession? lawyer clergyman doctor army officer

5. In one of his essays, the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler condemned book-collecting. He reckoned that the works of Webster, Whitaker and Bradshaw were sufficient for anyone’s library. Webster’s, of course, is a dictionary and Whitaker’s is an annual British almanac; but what would Butler have found in the pages of Bradshaw? rules of etiquette railway timetables a gazetteer of the world the laws of England

6. For some of us, the coming of the English spring is marked not by the sight of daffodils or the calls of cuckoos, but by the appearance of Wisden in the windows of bookshops. What sport does Wisden deal with? golf cricket football (soccer) horse racing

7. I am going to take a short holiday in an unfamiliar part of England, and I pack a copy of Pevsner’s volume on the county. How do I intend to spend my holiday? bird-watching browsing in bookshops drinking real ale in pubs looking at architecture

8. Sir George Grove was a Victorian civil engineer, but he had other interests as well. In the 1880s he published the first edition of what has become the most comprehensive reference work on which subject? card games photography classical mythology music

9. “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” first published in 1926, was probably the most influential book in its field in twentieth-century Britain. It is often referred to by the name of its compiler. Who was he? H. W. Fowler Henry Bradley Eric Partridge Otto Jespersen

10. If you want to know the biggest, smallest, fastest, most expensive, best-selling, most disastrous or generally most superlative example of anything, you might consult a Book of Records associated with a famous brewery. Which brewery? Budweiser Carling Guinness Bass