A Waugh novel was part of a question in a recent Round Britain Quiz on BBC Radio 4. The teams were Scotland and Wales and this question was put to the Scotland team:
Q8 (from Stephen Gore) In which apparently unproductive source might you look for novels by Evelyn Waugh and Iain M. Banks, and an orchestral work by George Benjamin?
The Scotland team answered correctly that the “unproductive source” was T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. They then correctly named the Waugh novel as A Handful of Dust and the Iain Banks novel as Consider Phlebus. They were unable to identify the George Benjamin work, to which the correct answer was Ringed by the Flat Horizon. The titles are all quotes from Eliot’s poem. The round was won by Scotland with 20 points to 17 for Wales. The program remains available on the internet on BBC iPlayer for 29 days.
