Literary Heavyweights Trivia Quiz

Answer: Julius Caesar

"Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look:
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous."

Caesar seems to take the conventional view that fat people are easy-going, indolent and unlikely to cause trouble, while their thinner counterparts are likely to be more active, ambitious and unscrupulous. He is certainly right to distrust Cassius: just before he speaks these words, we have seen Cassius sowing the seeds of conspiracy in Brutus' ear.

Answer: Falstaff

Falstaff's fatness, along with his appetite for drink, are often referred to jokingly in the two parts of Shakespeare's "Henry IV". But this only goes to show, as Falstaff says, that "I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men."

Answer: The Mayor of Hamelin

Although Browning's poem is set in Germany, his description of the Mayor as fat, bleary-eyed and gluttonous seems to follow our conventional British caricatures of our local dignitaries.

Answer: Father William

Robert Southey wrote a poem called "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them", one of those "improving" pieces of moralizing that Victorian children were often made to learn by heart. I imagine they were delighted to see the poem parodied so amusingly by Carroll, an Oxford don and a deacon of the Church of England.

Answer: oysters

In "Through the Looking-Glass", the sequel to "Alice in Wonderland", the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" is recited by Tweedledum and Tweedledee to Alice. The title characters invite a number of young oysters to leave their oyster-beds and join them for a walk along the sands - a walk that ends with the walrus and carpenter making a hearty meal of the oysters.

Answer: Billy Bunter

Charles Hamilton (using the pen-name Frank Richards) published his first Billy Bunter stories in a boys' magazine called "The Magnet" in 1908. After that magazine closed in 1940, Hamilton produced a number of Bunter books, continuing until his death in 1961, with some titles appearing posthumously. The stories have also been adapted for radio and television.

Though he was fat, greedy, lazy and mendacious, Bunter had a strange comic appeal which persisted for generations.

Answer: Nero Wolfe

Created in 1934, Wolfe appeared in 33 novels and 39 short stories between then and 1974, many of which were adapted for cinema, radio and TV. Like Sherlock Holmes, he has his adventures told by his sidekick. Unlike Holmes, however, he does not roam the city: indeed, he rarely leaves his luxurious brownstone house.

Answer: Thomas the Tank Engine, in the books of the Rev. W. Awdry

There are a good many locomotives and other vehicles in the 42-book "Railway Series" written by the Rev. Wilbert Awdry and his son Christopher Awdry, but Thomas is undoubtedly the best known. Their human boss, originally called the Fat Director, became a Controller when the British railway network was nationalized in 1948.

Many resurrected "heritage" steam railways hold "Thomas days" at regular intervals: they are usually excellent money-spinners.

Answer: Kingsley Amis

Roger Micheldene, the title character, is an English publisher visiting an out-of-the-way American university, where he manages to alienate everyone with his rudeness, snobbery, gluttony and general anti-American attitudes. David Lodge, writing some forty years after the novel appeared and several years after Amis' death, described the character as "in many respects a devastating and prophetic self-portrait."

Answer: Susie Orbach

Described by one critic as "the anti-diet guide to weight loss", Ms Orbach's book, first published in 1978, deals with the very complex reasons for compulsive eating and gives a programme for combating it.