Scottish Quotations Trivia Quiz

Answer: Robert Louis Stevenson

This comes from the novel 'Kidnapped', one of Stevenson's best loved novels. It is set shortly after the 1745 rebellion and tells the story of young David Balfour who, after the death of his father, visits his uncle Ebenezer to claim his inheritance. Ebenezer attempts to murder David, and when this fails, arranges for him to be kidnapped and shipped on board a brig to the plantations in Carolina as a slave worker. On board the vessel David meets the Jacobite outlaw Alan Breck Stewart and they have a fight with the crew of the brig, after which Alan asks this rhetorical question.

After many adventures in the Scottish Highlands, the story ends happily with David gaining his legacy and Alan Breck escaping to France. Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850, the grandson of the civil engineer Robert Stevenson who is famous for the construction of the Bell Rock lighthouse.

His father Thomas was also a lighthouse engineer, and Louis was expected to follow the family profession, but he showed little aptitude and, to his father's disappointment, abandoned it to pursue a writing career. Apart from 'Kidnapped' his best-known works include 'Treasure Island', 'The Master of Ballantrae' and 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'.

He suffered from ill-health throughout his life and eventually went into voluntary exile on the Pacific island of Upolu in Samoa, where he died at the early age of 44.

Answer: John Buchan

When used as an adjective, 'fickle' means 'changeable' or 'easily influenced', but, as a verb, it also means 'puzzle'. The sentence means 'You won't fool Thomas Yownie', and is found in the novel 'Huntingtower'.

John Buchan was born in 1875 in Perth to a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church. He attended the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford, at both of which he read Classics. After leaving Oxford he worked as a journalist and also studied law, being called to the Bar in 1901. In the same year he started a career in diplomacy, spending two years in South Africa. On returning to Britain he resumed the law and journalism, and entered politics. During the First World War he worked in France as a newspaper correspondent, in military intelligence and for the Ministry of Information. After the War he became involved in publishing and pursued his career in politics and diplomacy, being Member of Parliament for the Scottish Universities from 1928 to 1935, in which year he was ennobled as 1st Baron Tweedsmuir and appointed Governor General of Canada. He died in Montreal in 1940.
In addition to a full professional life Buchan had a very successful career as an author and published over a hundred books, starting when he was still an undergraduate. He wrote many volumes on history, biography, politics, military matters and poetry, but is best remembered for his novels, particularly a series of five which feature the soldier-adventurer Richard Hannay. The first and best-known ('The Thirty-Nine Steps') was published in 1915 and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. He called these stories his 'shockers', although they are tame by modern standards. Other fiction reflects his wide knowledge and experience and range from seventeenth-century Scotland to contemporary Canada. Many of his latter-day novels share recurring characters, and he may be said to have created two main protagonists apart from Richard Hannay: the lawyer and sometime Attorney-General Sir Edward Leithen and the retired Glasgow grocer Dickson McCunn. Of the three, Leithen resembles his creator the most and McCunn the least. Quiet, respectable and unadventurous (he has been compared to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins), in the three books in which he appears Mr McCunn manages to become involved in wild events despite himself. 'Huntingtower' is set in south-west Scotland where McCunn, while on a walking-tour, becomes entangled with a gang of Bolsheviks (the book was published in 1922, not long after the Russian Revolution), and is aided by the 'Gorbals Diehards', a gang of street urchins from the slums of Glasgow who are camping nearby. The leader Dougal has studied military history and is something of a strategist. Thomas Yownie is one of his henchmen and Dougal commends him with the quoted words.

Answer: Robert Burns

Robert Burns (1759-1796) was born in Ayrshire in south-east Scotland, the son of a poor tenant farmer. He had little formal education and gained most of his schooling from his father, a self-taught man. He started writing poetry in 1775 and his first efforts (like much of his later work) were inspired by a woman. He continued to write poetry both in Scots dialect and standard English, and on many themes, ranging from lyrical and historical to satirical.
The quotation comes from a poem by Burns which, like much of his work, is often set to music. It was not included in the first collection of his verse (the so-called 'Kilmarnock Edition', published in 1786) but appeared in about 1790 as part of 'The Scots Musical Museum'. This is a collection of 600 songs made by one James Johnson which appeared in six volumes between 1787 and 1803, of which Burns was the virtual editor and principal contributor. Referring to these lines, he wrote in his notes, "The first half-stanza of this song is old; the rest mine." Various versions exist; in some, the lines quoted open the first verse, while in others they form the first couplet of a chorus. The poem has been criticised as being overly sentimental and aimed at an English audience rather than the Scots for whom Burns generally wrote, but the mood of the time was to romanticise Scotland and especially the Highlands. This was a revulsion of feeling against the oppression and barbarity of Government troops following the failure of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and culminated in the romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott which glorified the Highlands and their culture.
Because of his working-class origin and Socialist leanings, Burns has been called the "people's poet". He is generally recognised as the national poet of Scotland, where he is known as "The Bard".

Answer: Alistair Maclean

Alistair Maclean was born in Glasgow in 1922. His mother tongue was Gaelic, and he learned English as a second language. After the outbreak of World War II he joined the Royal Navy and served in the Atlantic and later in the Mediterranean and the Far East. Following the war, he went to Glasgow University where he gained a degree in English, and then became a schoolteacher.

He published his first novel "HMS Ulysses" in 1955, followed by "The Guns of Navarone" and "South by Java Head", all of which drew upon his naval experiences.

In all he wrote twenty-eight novels, three books of non-fiction and a volume of short stories. He later moved to Switzerland for tax reasons, and succumbed to a stroke brought about by alcoholicism in 1987. The origin of the quotation is obscure, but may have been from an interview.

Answer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is part of the first remark addressed by Sherlock Holmes to Dr John Watson when they are introduced by Watson's friend Stamford in the novel "A Study in Scarlet". Published in 1887, it was the first Holmes story written by Conan Doyle, and was followed by three more novels and fifty-six short stories, the last being published in 1927, three years before Conan Doyle's death. Holmes is undoubtedly the most popular character in detective fiction; over two hundred films with more than seventy actors playing the part have been made about him, many using original stories outside the original canon. Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and graduated from its university with a medical degree in 1881.

He started writing short stories as an undergraduate, and in addition to the Holmes tales, he wrote historical fiction and adventure stories.

Answer: Sir J.M. Barrie

These words are from "Peter Pan". They are the somewhat inadequate directions which Peter gave to Wendy Darling as his address in Neverland in Barrie's original work, published first as a play in 1904 and expanded to a novel in 1911. They are often misquoted as "Second STAR to the right ...", because the Disney film "Peter Pan" opens with a song of which that is the first line.

Answer: Andrew Murray

Andy Murray is a Scottish tennis player who famously won the Men's Singles at Wimbledon in 2013, being the first Briton to do so since Fred Perry in 1936 and the first Scot to win a Wimbledon singles title in a hundred and seven years. Since turning professional in 2005 he has risen to world number three player, and British number one, in August 2013.

His national identity has been debated in the British media, often with humour; it is sometimes said that he is British when he is winning and Scottish if he is losing. Murray himself says that he is Scottish and British. The quotation is a comment he made about a good luck call from fellow-Scot Sir Sean Connery during the 2006 Wimbledon tournament. Connery was the first film actor to portray James Bond and did so in seven films.

Answer: John Buchan

This is from "The Three Hostages", a novel featuring the protagonist Richard Hannay. The story is a grim one of child kidnapping and blackmail, but, as in many of Buchan's book, there are moments of humour. Here Hannay's friend Sandy Arbuthnot is describing a mock anti-Papist political speech he once made.

Answer: Roy Williamson

Roy Williamson was a folk singer and a member of the group The Corries, which was formed in 1962 in Williamson's home city, Edinburgh. After going through a number of changes in personnel, in 1966 the group became a duo comprising Williamson and Ronnie Browne, who had been fellow students at Edinburgh College of Art.

The partnership lasted until Williamson's death of a brain tumour in 1990. He is perhaps best remembered for writing "Flower of Scotland", which has become one of a number of unofficial Scottish national anthems.

Answer: Sir Walter Scott

These words, often misattributed to Shakespeare, in fact come from the epic poem "Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field", published by Scott in 1808. It describes the Battle of Flodden, where in 1513 the Scottish army was soundly defeated by the English and many members of the Scots nobility, including King James IV, were killed.

The poem, generally known as "Marmion", was not well-received at first, as the protagonist, Lord Marmion, is an anti-hero, which was against popular feeling at the time, and the author's long-winded display of scholarship and outdated concepts of chivalry was found to be tedious.

It has become more popular over the last century or so; the "Song of Young Lochinvar", found in the fifth canto or section of the poem, is often extracted and used in anthologies and for recitation.