Seek the Truth

The Quiz

Twelve questions about literature, history, and the things covered in this issue. The answers are at the bottom — but try not to look.

Strong Words · April/May 2026 · p. 74

Interactive quiz UI is out of scope for this probe conversion — questions and answers preserved as text.

1. Roger Casement was executed in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising. Before his career as an Irish nationalist, he had produced two celebrated reports on colonial atrocities — one in the Congo and one in South America. In which South American country was his second investigation conducted?
2. Desmond Bagley embedded a real newspaper headline into the first block of an experimental narrative — or did he? Actually, it was someone else: a digital pioneer encoded a Times headline into the very first block of a famous decentralised network. What was the date on that front page, and what was the story?
3. Siân Hughes's collection Pearl takes its title and some of its imagery from a medieval poem. The original Pearl is thought to have been written by the same anonymous poet who gave us another famous work — a story of a knight, a green stranger, and a test of honour. What is that second poem?
4. The French phrase affaire, used for a public scandal, has given us several famous examples: the Dreyfus Affair, the Markovic Affair reviewed in this issue, and — using the full French construction — the Profumo affair's nearest French equivalent in terms of political disruption. But in which year did the body that triggered the Markovic affair come to light?
5. Vina Moraes, the Brazilian poet and lyricist discussed in this issue, is perhaps best known internationally for a song first performed in 1962. The song became one of the most recorded in history. What is it called, and who composed the music?
6. The oystercatcher — that loud, pied wader of rocky coasts — appears in more than one piece of writing discussed in this issue. What is the oystercatcher's Latin binomial name, and what feature of its behaviour gave the bird the English name it now has (somewhat inaccurately, as it turns out)?
7. Alain Delon appeared in one of Henri-Georges Clouzot's final projects, but he is more closely associated with two directors whose bodies of work define French cinema of the 1960s. Name either director.
8. Desmond Bagley's The Snow Tiger is set partly in New Zealand and partly in the format of a public inquiry. Which real-world disaster inquiry — one of the most significant in New Zealand's legal history — does the novel's structure most closely resemble, and in approximately what decade did it take place?
9. The Chelsea Hotel in New York, discussed in this issue, has sheltered an extraordinary catalogue of creative residents. Which Welsh poet, famous for his reading tours of America and his poem beginning "Do not go gentle into that good night," died in New York in 1953 and is associated with the hotel?
10. Bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor used a name that is Japanese in form. "Nakamoto" is a common Japanese surname; "Satoshi" is a given name meaning, roughly, what? (Three acceptable translations in common use.)
11. The medieval poem Pearl is an example of a specific verse form that uses both alliteration and end-rhyme. It belongs to which general tradition of Middle English alliterative poetry, sometimes called by a geographical name referring to where the main manuscripts were produced?
12. Strong Words has reviewed several books in this issue that involve documentary evidence being withheld, suppressed, or placed under lock and key. Name one specific archive or document mentioned in this issue that is currently sealed and unavailable to researchers — and say approximately when it might become accessible.