Dear classics reader,
In this week’s concert programme you will find:
The Read the Classics Christmas Quiz 2025;
Birthday wishes to Italo Svevo;
This week’s new classics, including Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our third discussion of James Joyce’s Dubliners – with notes on Ivy Day and Tom Kernan’s hat.
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Classics Christmas Quiz 2025
Here’s an early Christmas present! Happy Christmas everyone.
It’s panto night and the wicked queen has stolen the show’s best joke! Oh no, she hasn’t . . . Oh yes, she has! The show can’t go on unless we find that joke. I wonder, can you help me, girls and boys? I said, can you help me girls and boys?! Ah, that’s better. All you need to do to break the spell and find the lost comedy gold is solve these ten questions.
Each question has a sequence of letters that need to be arranged in the correct order: enter them vertically on the stage below (avoiding blue squares) and hey presto! The show can begin.
(Here’s a version of the grid that you can print to fill in.)
1. BUTTONS
Where would you find these literary buttons?
‘I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.’ I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.
‘Finest specimens of human molars,’ he informed me.
___
‘How can you tear your clothes so, my Merricat?’
‘I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.’
___
‘Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; ‘and when they grow older they know it.’
___
Our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.
___
Taking a knife from the table, [he] cut me off one of the silver buttons from his coat. ‘I had them,’ says he, ‘from my father, Duncan Stewart; and now give ye one of them to be a keepsake for last night’s work. And wherever ye go and show that button, the friends of Alan Breck will come around you.’
___
C The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
F We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
R Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
S The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
P The Waves by Virginia Woolf
2. HORSING AROUND
Can you match these fictional horses’ front halves with their rear ends?
Black ___
Gun ___
Pie ___
Shadow ___
Silver ___
O Bald
U Blaze
H Fax
S Powder
I Beauty
3. GOOD FAIRIES
Can you identify these bookish fairies?
E La Belle Dame Sans Merci
N The Blue Fairy
A The Faerie Queene
O Morgan le Fay
W Puck
M Thumbelina
O Tinker Bell
4. BOO! HISS!
And can you place these literary hisses?
‘Not fair! not fair!’ he hissed. ‘It isn’t fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it’s got in its nassty little pocketses?’
___
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. / No one left and no one came / On the bare platform.
___
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, / Then nightly sings the staring owl, / Tu-whit! Tu-who! A merry note, / While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
___
Kaa opened his mouth for the first time and spoke one long hissing word, and the far-away monkeys, hurrying to the defence of the Cold Lairs, stayed where they were, cowering, till the loaded branches bent and crackled under them.
___
P The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
T Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
D ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas
H The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
5. PRINCIPAL BOYS
What are the true identities of these cross-dressing Shakespearean characters?
___ Balthazar in The Merchant of Venice
___ Cesario in Twelfth Night
___ The Fat Woman of Brentford in The Merry Wives of Windsor
___ Fidele in Cymbeline
___ Ganymede in As You Like It
___ ‘Madam’ in The Taming of the Shrew
___ Sebastian in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
B Imogen
C Julia
Y Portia
H Rosalind
E Viola
K Bartholomew
B Falstaff
6. MEN IN TIGHTS
And can you name these screen actors?
A Robbie Coltrane
A Tony Curtis
I Johnny Depp
A Dustin Hoffman
O John Travolta
R Robin Williams
7. MOTHER GOOSE
Where have these literary geese flown from?
Wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock . . . one flew east, one flew west . . .
___
Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters.
___
For that day we all must labour, / Though we die before it break; / Cows and horses, geese and turkeys, / All must toil for freedom’s sake.
___
‘There are no boundaries among the geese. [. . .] How can you have boundaries if you fly? Those ants of yours—and the humans too—would have to stop fighting in the end, if they took to the air.’ ‘I like fighting,’ said the Wart.
___
I’ll love you till the ocean / Is folded and hung up to dry / And the seven stars go squawking / Like geese about the sky.
___
What do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars?
___
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
___
S ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ by W. H. Auden
I One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
E A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
N Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
D Animal Farm by George Orwell
A Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
L The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White
8. KING RAT
Who created these fictional rats?
___ Samuel Whiskers
___ Scabbers
___ Scrabble
___ Templeton
L Louisa May Alcott
S Beatrix Potter
L J. K. Rowling
C E. B. White
9. THE DAME
Can you name these acting legends?
A Dame Eileen Atkins
L Dame Judi Dench
H Dame Vanessa Redgrave
? Dame Maggie Smith
A Dame Harriet Walter
F Dame Penelope Wilton
10. HAPPILY EVER AFTER
And finally, which novels end with these happy last lines?
He smiled and took her hand and pressed it. They got up and walked out of the gallery. They stood for a moment at the balustrade and looked at Trafalgar Square. Cabs and omnibuses hurried to and fro, and crowds passed, hastening in every direction, and the sun was shining.
___
‘Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!—Selina would stare when she heard of it.’—But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.
___
Touched to the heart, Mrs. March could only stretch out her arms, as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself, and say, with face and voice full of motherly love, gratitude, and humility . . . ‘Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!’
___
Youth enwrapped them; the song of Phaethon announced passion requited, love attained. But they were conscious of a love more mysterious than this. The song died away; they heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean.
___
O Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
T Emma by Jane Austen
! A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
A Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
If you enjoyed this quiz, please share it with your friends and family! (If not, please share it with your enemies.)
And if you’d like some more, you might like to (re)attempt last year’s Read the Classics Christmas Quiz 2024.
Happy Birthday Svevo
In other news, today was Italo Svevo’s birthday.
Svevo was the pen name of Ettore Schmitz, who was born and lived in Trieste. His Jewish parents were German and Italian, he grew up speaking the German-Venetian Triestine dialect, and his native city changed hands from Austria to Italy during his lifetime. He chose his pseudonym, ‘Italo Svevo’ (‘Italian Swabian’), to express this mixed heritage.
Schmitz spent 20 years working as a bank clerk and yearning to be an author. His first two novels, about bored clerks with cultural pretensions, were unsuccessful, so he gave up writing, married his cousin Livia Veneziani and worked for his father-in-law’s ships’ paint business.
In 1906, however, he met the young James Joyce, who was tutoring English in Trieste and hoping to find a publisher for Dubliners. Joyce encouraged Svevo’s writing, promoting La Coscienza di Zeno around Europe and transforming Svevo into a literary celebrity.
Svevo’s modernist prose has been compared to Proust and Kafka, as well as to Joyce himself. V. S. Pritchett described him as ‘one of the most original artists of an original generation’.
Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo (1923)
When vain, obsessive and guilt-ridden Zeno Cosini seeks help for his neuroses, his psychoanalyst suggests he writes his memoirs as a form of therapy. Zeno’s account is an alternative reality, a series of elliptical episodes dealing with the death of his father, his career, his marriage and affairs, and, above all, his passion for smoking and his spectacular failure to resist the promise of that last cigarette. A hymn to self-delusion and procrastination, Svevo’s devilishly funny portrayal of a man’s attempt to give up smoking and make sense of his life has become a cult classic.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 464 pages | translated by William Weaver
[US] Vintage | 464 pages | translated by William Weaver | preface by Elizabeth Hardwick
What’s new this week?
As usual, there aren’t many classics reissues around Christmas, but there were two new titles out this week.
Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke (1971)
Miranda, her husband Louis, and their infant daughter are set to spend the summer in a rented villa in Tuscany. He’s a self-assured young American actor; she, a well-educated, well-bred English ingénue. But when Louis is called away to a shoot, Miranda is left alone with her baby in the remote Italian countryside—until a young Italian named Oreste arrives, claiming to have been invited by her now-absent husband.
Miranda quickly falls under the interloper’s spell—and into his arms—launching into a feverish affair that threatens to dissolve her already fragile, fracturing sense of self. As events spiral further out of her control, the novel hurtles headlong toward its horrifying conclusion.
[US / UK] McNally Editions | 224 pages | foreword by Emma Cline
Yevgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (1833)
The aristocratic Yevgeny Onegin has come into his inheritance, leaving the glamour of St Petersburg’s social life to take up residence at his uncle’s country estate. Master of the nonchalant bow, the aristocratic Onegin is the very model of a social butterfly – a fickle dandy, liked by all for his wit and easy ways.
When the shy and passionate Tatyana falls in love with him, Onegin condescendingly rejects her, and instead diverts himself by flirting with her sister, Olga - with terrible consequences. One of the greatest works in all Russian literature by the founder of modern Russian literature, Yevgeny Onegin is a timeless story of vanity, innocence and love.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 256 pages | translated by Anthony Briggs
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
Next month we will be reading The Call of the Wild by Jack London over two weeks: we’ll start on Friday 9 January. More details here.
And over the course of 2026, we will be reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from January to December. This read-along will be available for free for all subscribers. Here are the details.
If you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
Dubliners (3 of 4)
And finally, this week we’ve read the three stories of ‘public life’ in Dubliners by James Joyce. Here are my thoughts:
