The Great Imaginative Conservative Pub Quiz (1)

Has the traditional, jolly-old, British pub-quiz crossed the pond to the former colonies? I say, chaps and chapesses, time that it did if it hasn’t already. Eh, what?

Usually, a designated quiz-master sets the questions, teams of four to ten people compete, and the winners become quiz-masters next time. There are between fifty and 100 questions per quiz, presented in sets of ten or so. I’ll start out with ten and hope that you will contribute the rest, mine on the topic of “Matters Kirkian.” (Answers linked to sources).

1. Two great American conservatives of the 20th century studied Sanskrit and one even taught it. Who were they?
2. What friend of Russell Kirk wrote a famous erotic poem about two sisters, um, skinny-dipping?
3. One of Dr. Kirk’s favourite novelists and mentioned in “The Conservative Mind,” who wrote to his sister: “I throw what weight I may have on the side of those who believe in an aristocracy of brains, as against the brute domination of the quarter-educated mob,” some 11 years before he penned “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft”?
4. This artist and friend of Dr. Kirk founded the radical, ultra-modernist “Vorticist” movement before World War One, and went on to write novels and criticism?
5. In 1954, Dr. Kirk wrote a book about a town. Which one?
6. What did Dr. Kirk’s father, Russell Andrew Kirk, do “all the livelong day?”
7. In “Confessions of a Bohemian Tory,” Dr. Kirk wrote about a modern person who developed stigmata. Who was it?
8. After a long and most trying experience, Dr. Kirk abandoned Michigan State University in 1959. What else did he call it besides “Behemoth University”?
9. This one of Dr. Kirk’s favourite authors wrote about land in the Punjab and whether British civil servants in India should be made to learn Persian, before penning a still-seminal book on how ancient law became contract law.
10. This favourite author of Dr. Kirk’s started out as an illiterate shepherd before writing some of 19^th Century Scotland’s best-loved poems and novels. Still, when he died Wordsworth sneered: “He was undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions.”

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