Delighted Trivia Quiz

Answer:

"The Box of Delights" was written by the British author John Masefield in 1935. It's actually the second book in a series; the first one was "The Midnight Folk", written in 1927. It also involves magic, and has the first appearance of Kay Harker and his governess, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer. Ramon Llull was a real person; he wasn't a magician, though, he was a philosopher who lived from about 1232 to about 1315.

"The Box of Delights" is more than just a book, though! There have been a lot of different adaptions of it into different kinds of media over time. The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, made four different audio adaptions between 1943 and 1977, which were broadcast over radio. In 1984, the BBC made a television adaption of "The Box of Delights". It starred Devin Stanfield, Patrick Troughton and Robert Stephens, and was the most expensive children's programme on the BBC ever made at that time--it cost a whopping 1 million pounds to make!

There was even an opera adaption of "The Box of Delights". The words were written by the book's author John Masefield himself; in the 1980s, Robert Steadman put music to it.

John Masefield himself was a famous writer. From 1930 to 1967, he was Poet Laureate, a special position appointed by the monarch of Great Britain. He wrote both poetry and novels. "The Box of Delights" was his third of three books for children. He died in 1967.