The Penguin Book Quiz

Tip: Start the day with a quiz. My long-suffering partner bought me James Walton’s The Penguin Book Quiz for Christmas. It wakes you up, gives you a laugh and makes you feel like you’re not wasting your time, because you’re learning things – Jacqueline Wilson * The Sunday Times *Detailed, entertaining and wonderfully informative, a must-have for quiz aficionados and bibliophiles alike * Kevin Ashman *It’s so much fun. The perfect level for keen but not necessarily expert readers. Specific enough to make you reach back into your memory and occasionally kick yourself at not finding the answer, but not so specialised that you want to give up … I’ll definitely be buying copies of this book as giftsFew quiz questions make you smile, laugh or gasp. James Walton’s always do. The Penguin Book Quiz is unceasingly enormous funQuite possibly the greatest social lubricant since the invention of alcohol. An absolute delightAttractively presented in vintage Penguin livery, this is the ultimate literary quiz, packed full of questions on everyone from Dickens to Dahl. With such a broad range of genres and topics covered, The Penguin Book Quiz really is the perfect antidote to tired parlour games and awkward small talk this Christmas * Waterstones, Top 10 Gifts for Bookworms this Christmas *The perfect gift for the sort of person (like me) who shouts the answers at University ChallengeFiendish, funny and endlessly surprising, James Walton has provided the perfect volume for anyone who loves books, relishes a quiz or just fancies showing off at a dinner partyA must for those who think they know their literature … includes the unexpected, alongside the more serious * Independent on ‘Sonnets, Bonnets & Bennetts’ *How nice it would be if the family would sit around the Boxing Day fireside considering the questions in affable competition * Daily Telegraph on ‘Sonnets, Bonnets & Bennetts’ *

James Walton has written and hosted 17 series of BBC Radio 4’s books quiz, The Write Stuff. He also writes questions for BBC2’s Only Connect and contributes a weekly quiz to the FT Weekend magazine. He is the books editor of Reader’s Digest and reviews books for the Spectator, The Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and The New York Review of Books. His previous books are The Faber Book of Smoking and Sonnets, Bonnets and Bennetts- A Literary Quiz Book.