Still Alive Trivia Quiz

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907, at the age of just 42, making him the youngest recipient of the award in the 20th century. Perhaps a defence could be made for those who killed him off too early when one considers that, despite his relatively young age, the Nobel award came when most of Kipling's work was already behind him.

The 29 years subsequent saw relatively few works published. One of the few was the anthology, "Rewards and Fairies". Included in this collection was the 1895 poem, "If-" that was, more than 100 years later, voted as the UK's favourite poem.

Answer: Dick Cheney

CNN had based its template on the UK's Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who had died the previous year. This template also explained why Pope John Paul II's obituary had noted his "love of racing". Other notable souls prematurely written off included Nelson Mandela and Bob Hope.

Had Cheney died in 2001 as CNN had suggested, then he would not have served a second term as US Vice-President, wouldn't have been in a position to argue for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and he wouldn't have been around to accidentally shoot one of his companions when out hunting in Texas in 2006.

Answer: Lord Lucan

The dropped trousers was not an Australian procedural peculiarity but was due to the fact that Lord Lucan had a six inch scar on his thigh. In those pre-global mass communication days, there was no quick way to share information between two countries on opposite sides of the globe and as the two men shared some similarities in their looks and styling, the scar was the only way that the Australian police could be certain which of their men they had got.

Stonehouse was a complicated character. He held several ministerial posts in Harold Wilson's government of the 1960s. When Wilson's government was defeated in the 1970 election, Stonehouse's fortunes took a turn for the worse. He failed to win a seat in the shadow cabinet, thereby reducing his salary. In an attempt to make up the shortfall, he started various business enterprises but none were a success and Stonehouse, an economist by training, took to a bit of creative accounting to ward off his creditors. He remained close enough to power to be aware that the authorities were looking into his affairs and that's when the idea of re-birth came to him.

Stonehouse was practiced at subterfuge and misdirection. In 1969, it had been suggested in the British press that he was a spy for the Communist government in Czechoslovakia. This was always officially denied but declassified documents released to the public in 2009 and 2010 showed that the rumour was indeed true and that the government of Margaret Thatcher had covered up the story when its veracity first came to the attention of the British Secret Services.

Answer: Michael Heseltine

The satirist Chris Morris had a strong history of persuading celebrities to make fools of themselves in public, including engineering a question in the UK parliament about an entirely made-up drug called "Cake". Always controversial, the BBC felt obliged to act when in the middle of a live show he announced Heseltine's death from a heart attack, inviting a guest on the show, fellow Conservative MP Jerry Hayes, to deliver an impromptu eulogy on the air.

Michael Heseltine was a man almost as famous for his mane of hair as for his achievements in politics. His CV included a long stint as a minister in Thatcher's government and a key role in her eventual departure from the Prime Minister's office when he stood against her in the 1990 election for leader of the Conservative Party. This action saw him become a pariah to many in his own party.

Had Morris's declaration been true, Heseltine would never have returned to front line politics as he did in 1995 when his support for troubled Prime Minister John Major was rewarded with his elevation to the role of Deputy PM.

Answer: Harold Pinter

By the time of the first announcement of Pinter's death, he was concentrating on writing poetry and had, to the disappointment of many, left stage plays behind. He had not abandoned the theatre entirely, however. He took the lead (and indeed only) role in Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" in a special short run to celebrate 50 years of London's Royal Court theatre, where many of his plays had received their first run.

Pinter's plays were distinctive in style, enough for the word "Pinteresque" to enter the dictionary. The situations in which he placed his protagonists were nearly always darkly comic and frequently absurd. The famous pauses that he inserted into lines of speech, reflected Pinter's desire for natural speech patterns and to demonstrate that his characters were thinking of the words they were speaking rather than delivering someone else's lines.

Pinter was twice nominated for an Oscar in his role as screenwriter; once for "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981); and once for "Betrayal" (1983).

Answer: Jeff Goldblum

Goldblum's supposed death struggled for media space as it came on the same day as the real deaths of Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett in 2009. Nevertheless, it made it to the airwaves via several Australian news stations. The rumour came about as a result of a spoof website that randomly generated fake news stories about celebrities. Goldblum was reported to have fallen off a cliff while filming in New Zealand.

Goldblum, whose fame comes from his appearances in such films as "Independence Day" (1996) and "Jurassic Park" (1993), took the news well. He appeared on US late night show, "The Colbert Report" and announced that he "would be missed" not least because he "was not only a friend and a mentor - but he was also me."

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The cause of the mistaken coroner's report was the discovery of a man's body hanging in London's Hyde Park. The only means of identifying the man was the shirt he was wearing that bore a tag with Coleridge's name upon it. It is believed that the man had stolen the shirt from Coleridge's laundry.

To buy into the story of Coleridge's premature death might not have required a "suspension of disbelief" (a phrase that was coined by Coleridge himself), given that he was prone to bouts of depression that he treated with self-administered doses of opium. However, the hotel guest's surprise at the news was due to Coleridge's very recent success with his play, "Remorse", that had garnered particularly favourable reviews.

Answer: Jonathan Swift

Swift, the author of both "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Modest Proposal", was a devout man of the cloth. He was driven to perpetrate his hoax by sarcastic comments by Partridge about the "infallibility" of the church. Given the consistent inaccuracies of the predictions in Partridge's own almanacs, the means of striking back seemed obvious.

In February 1708, Bickerstaffe's almanac, entitled "A Vindication of the Stars" appeared on the streets of London. It predicted Partridge's death by a raging fever at 11pm on March 29th. When the day came, Swift printed an elegy, written by Bickerstaffe, that noted the accuracy of the prediction save for the time, which was four hours out. It reported that Partridge had admitted with his last words that he was a fraud.

Partridge tried to refute the claim. He published a pamphlet to declare Bickerstaffe a fraud, only for Swift to respond that the pamphlet clearly demonstrated that Partridge was dead as "no living man could have written such rubbish".

Answer: Marcus Garvey

Poor old Marcus. One would hope that reading your own obituary would give you the impetus to go on and achieve more wonderful things in your life in the "extra" years you had left. Sadly for Marcus it was merely extra minutes. But, he achieved a great deal in the time he did have on the planet and inspired a fair few followers along the way.

Trained in philosophy and the law, he left his native land and travelled the world, delivering speeches on the situation of the African diaspora. He sought to establish an industrially-advanced and permanent homeland, Liberia, for all Africans around the world to return to and call their home.

His avowal of Pan-African philosophies made him some enemies too. In 1919, he was convicted in the United States on what many would call a contrived charge for mail fraud. After serving four years in prison he was deported to his native Jamaica. When his premature obituary was written, it was highly critical of his life, which possibly proved a factor in his fatal reaction to it.

Answer: Mark Twain

Despite the fame of his quote (or its inaccurate derivatives), Samuel Clemens, author, as Mark Twain, of such seminal works as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", never saw his own obituary in print. However, a report in the "New York Herald" suggested that he was seriously ill and declining rapidly. The mistake derived from a serious illness suffered by his London-based cousin, J.R. Clemens, in 1897. Twain was at the time also in London, covering Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee for the "New York Journal". When the editors of the Journal saw the Herald's report they saw an opportunity to ridicule their rival and invited Twain to respond. His scribbled letter offered in return contained the now legendary phrase.

Oddly, Clemens was to prove very successful at predicting when he would die. The year prior to his death he is quoted as having said, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it." One day after the comet's closest approach to earth, Clemens suffered a heart attack and died, aged 74.