1. Who described football as being "bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence"?

   1. Nick Hornby

   2. George Orwell

   3. Martin Amis

   4. Kevin Sampson

2. Who turned to writing fiction after a catastrophic experience on Devon Loch?

   1. Daphne du Maurier

   2. Agatha Christie

   3. Dick Francis

   4. RD Blackmore

3. 

   Which sporty writer, who was plagued by physical illness, said: “What ruined me at bottom was athletics. With all that jumping and running when I was young ...   I wore out the machine before its time.”

   1. David Foster Wallace

   2. John Updike

   3. Ernest Hemingway

   4. Samuel Beckett

4. Who said sport is "not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection"?

   1. Slavoj Zizek

   2. Theodor Adorno

   3. Michel Foucault

   4. Andrea Dworkin

5. 

   What effect did watching football have on the young Umberto Eco?

   1. It prompted him to become an academic

   2. He took up rugby

   3. It made him doubt the existence of God for the first time

   4. He was inspired to write a monograph called Camus, Goalkeeping and Existentialism

6.  Sport is a crafty way of  "deflecting the populace from political action". Who proposed abolishing it to further the cause of socialism?

   1. Terry Eagleton

   2. George Bernard Shaw

   3. HG Wells

   4. Doris Lessing

7. 

   Martin Amis is a keen tennis player, but which one of his characters comes to regret boasting about his nonexistent game?

   1. Charles Highway in The Rachel Papers

   2. Keith Talent in London Fields

   3. John Self in Money

   4. Richard Tull in The Information

8. "I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense" was which writer's contrarian opinion?

   1. Dorothy Parker

   2. Oscar Wilde

   3. Evelyn Waugh

   4. HL Mencken 

9. Whose memoir Not a Games Person detailed their hatred of school sports?

   1. David Sedaris

   2. Julie Myerson

   3. Diana Athill

   4. Nora Ephron

10. “EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.” This anti-competitive statement comes from which book?

    1. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

    2. News from Nowhere by William Morris

    3. Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes

    4. Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud

Solutions

1:B, 2:C, 3:D, 4:B, 5:C, 6:A, 7:C, 8:D, 9:B, 10:A

Scores

1. 2 and above.

   Dismal. Hang your medal–less head in shame.

2. 4 and above.

   Better luck next time, old sport.

3. 6 and above.

   A fairly robust attempt, but not enough to land the top spot on the podium.

4. 8 and above.

   Gold gold gold – a Herculean feat!