With Added Limericks! My Greatest Common Bond? Quiz

Answer: Louisville

The Kentucky Derby is a classic race for three-year-old thoroughbred horses, run on the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs, Louisville, Kentucky. It is the first leg of the American Triple Crown, and has been run since 1875.

Louisville is the largest city in Kentucky. It was founded in 1778 and named for the French King Louis XVI because of the help the French gave the USA in the struggle against the English. As well as the Kentucky Derby, Louisville is also the home of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and founder Harland Sanders died there in 1980.

Answer: Cassius

Marcus Junius Brutus (the Younger) and Gaius Cassius Longinus were two of the leading plotters against Gaius Julius Caesar. In all there were about 40 plotters. On 15 March, 44BC, they killed Caesar, the Dictator of Rome.

In Dante's "Inferno", published in 1314 and part of his epic poem "Divine Comedy", hell is shown as nine concentric circles at the centre of the earth, with increasingly wicked people suffering increasingly worse punishment as you moved towards the centre. At the very centre were those who had committed treachery against God. The Devil was there, immobilized in a lake of ice. He had three faces, and wept from his six eyes. In his three mouths he chewed eternally on the worst traitors. The worst, central, mouth was reserved for Judas. The left and right mouths had Brutus and Cassius, the men responsible for killing the man Dante saw as destined to lead a united Italy and the world.

Answer: Rome

The mythical story of the founding of Rome is that when Aeneas fled the fall of Troy, as mentioned in the Greek Homer's "The Iliad" and the Roman Virgil's "Aeneid", he went to Italy. His descendants included Romulus and Remus, the brothers who fought, with Remus dying, and Romulus going on to found the city of Rome. The date of April 21, was especially auspicious for Romans, the holy date of the deity Pales. The founding year of 753BC was calculated by Roman scholars using astrology and astronomy.

William Shakespeare's play set in Rome, and based on a true story, "Julius Caesar", is believed to have been written in 1599.

Answer: Sonny Bono

Salvatore Phillip Bono was born in Detroit in 1935. He was given the nickname Sonny by his mother. He worked in various roles in the music industry, acting as a "gofer" for Phil Spector. He met Cherilyn Sarkisian in 1962, when she was 16 and he was 27. They became an item and worked together as "Caesar and Cleo" - releasing some singles in 1964. When they rebranded themselves as Sonny and Cher they had success with songs like "Baby Don't Go", "I Got You Babe" and "The Beat Goes On", all written and produced by Bono. They split up professionally in 1977 after divorcing in 1975.

Bono went on to become an actor, on TV ("Charlie's Angels" and "CHiPs") and in movies ("Hairspray" (1988) and "Men in Black" (1997)). He also became a politician, serving as mayor of Palm Beach, California from 1988-1992 and in the House of Representatives between 1995 and 1998.

Answer: Converted to Islam and changed name

Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., known as Lew Alcindor, was a basketball phenomenon. He won 71 consecutive high school games and then became a three-time winner of the MVP award in the NCAA while playing basketball for UCLA. In 1971, at the age of 24, after leading the Milwaukee Bucks to their first NBA championship, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. His records in professional basketball include six NBA championships and six NBA MVP awards.

Dollar Brand was a South African jazz pianist and composer, part of the legendary "Cape Jazz" group The Jazz Epistles alongside Hugh Masekela and Kippie Moeketsi. After converting to Islam in 1968 he took the name Abdullah Ibrahim.

Malcolm Little was best known as Malcolm X, a campaigner against racial injustice in the USA. The move to the surname X was to get rid of the name his ancestors had been given by their slave owner. When he converted to Islam and undertook the Hajj in 1964, he adopted the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

Joe Tex was originally called Joseph Arrington, Jr.. His hit singles included "Hold What You've Got" (1964) and "Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)" (1977). In 1966, after becoming a Muslim, he changed his name to Yusuf Hazziez.

Steven Demetre Georgiou adopted the stage name Cat Stevens, and had massive success with songs such as "The First Cut Is the Deepest" (1967) and "Moonshadow" (1970). On conversion to Islam he took the name Yusuf Islam in 1978 and abandoned his music career for several years.

Answer: Vietnam

"The Quiet American" is a novel by Graham Greene that was published in 1955. Its story is set against the Indochina Wars where the Vietnamese were attempting to remove the French colonists. The novel looks at the increasing involvement of the USA in Vietnam, as Cold War tension was racked up and the threat from Communism was a key factor in American foreign policy. Fowler, an English journalist, meets an American in the CIA called Pyle.

They fall out over a local woman, the 20-year-old Phuong. Fowler discovers Pyle's clandestine involvement in terrorism in the cause of a Vietnamese war lord.

The book was very popular in the UK - less popular in the USA, where it was considered anti- American.

Answer: True

The area that is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been inhabited for 90,000 years.

The area was first explored by the Belgians in the late 19th century, with Henry Morton Stanley working for King Leopold II. Leopold wanted to form a colony, claiming to be a humanitarian. He formed the Congo Free State in 1885.

Leopold's brutal exploitation of the native population in the cause of the rubber industry disgusted even other European colonists and the Belgian state reluctantly took the area away from him, renaming it the Belgian Congo in 1908.

The Belgians were eventually removed by rebellion in 1960, with the formation of "Republic of Congo". Because the neighbouring country chose the exact same name, it became known as "Congo-Léopoldville" after the capital city. A coup by Joseph Mobutu, in 1965, resulted in another name change, for the city and the country, which became "Democratic Republic of The Congo - Kinshasa". Later, in 1971, he renamed the country again, to "Republic of Zaire".

In 1997, after years of civil wars, the country was named "Democratic Republic of the Congo" by Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

Answer: Manila

The City of Manila is the largest city and the capital of the Philippines. The city was founded on the island of Luzon by the Spanish in 1571, and is one of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world. The name comes from the Filipino language, meaning "where indigo is found".

Manila hemp is obtained from the abacá plant, a relative of the banana. It is mostly used to make various types of paper such as the well known Manila paper and tea bags. It is also used for hats and was formerly used for rope.

A Manila shawl is a highly decorative embroidered silk shawl that is particularly popular with Spanish dancers.

Answer: Parkinson

Michael Parkinson was a legend of British television who had a Saturday night chat show that ran between 1971 and 1982 and later between 1998 and 2007. Guests included Orson Welles, Fred Astaire and James Stewart. He was less happy about an encounter with Rod Hull and Emu.

James Parkinson (1755-1824) was a polymath whose 1817 work "An Essay on the Shaking Palsy" described the condition that was subsequently named Parkinson's Disease after him. It is a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that has the symptoms of shaking and difficulty in motor skills. These symptoms are known as "Parkinsonism" or Parkinson's syndrome. The cause is unknown, but there are thought to be genetic and environmental factors.

C. Northcote Parkinson was a historian and author who coined the famous "Parkinson's Law", that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".

Pansy Parkinson from the "Harry Potter" books was a Slytherin student at Hogwarts who was friendly with Draco Malfoy and an enemy of the hero.

Answer: Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali, "The Greatest" (see what I did with the title?), was born Cassius (2) Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky (1) on January 17, 1942. He won a gold medal for boxing as a light-heavyweight in 1960 at the Rome (3) Olympics. When he beat Sonny(4) Liston in a sensational upset in 1964 he became the professional boxing heavyweight world champion.

He had been attending meetings of the Nation of Islam, and announced his religious affiliation and a name change to Muhammad Ali (5) shortly afterwards.

In 1966, he refused to be drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam (6) and was stripped of his titles and refused a licence to box. He returned to boxing in 1971 and recaptured the heavyweight crown from George Foreman in the fight known as "The Rumble in the Jungle" that was held in Kinshasa, Zaire (7) in 1974.

His brutal series of fights against Joe Frazier were legendary, including the 1975 "Thrilla in Manila" (8). In later years, Ali showed symptoms of Parkinsonism (9). British TV viewers had fond memories of his appearances with Michael Parkinson (9), who said that Ali was his favourite guest.