Interview with Caroline Taggart

You may be wondering where you have seen the name Caroline Taggart before? She is in fact the author of the "I Used to Know That" book, which to date has sold around 230,000 copies I am told. The book looks at those essential treasure troves of information we all feel we should know and probably once did know but have perhaps forgotten or need refreshed on. Ideal for Quizzers! Caroline also has wrote books including The Book of London Place Names and the book we will focus on here, "I Used to Know That Activity Book".

I will be reviewing this title in the coming days as I continue to work my way through it. All I will say on the subject now is that if you put aside the title regarding school, this is a cracking book for quizzers of all abilities testing both the breadth and depth of knowledge in certain areas as well as working an ideal family book. Well worth a look. Links to purchase the book via Amazon are below.

Interview with  Author Caroline Taggart

How would you describe the book in one sentence? A quiz book with a bit of a difference, based on stuff you (probably) learned at school but have (probably) forgotten most of.

What inspired you to write the book? A few years ago I wrote a book called I Used to Know That: stuff you forgot from school. It was really amazingly successful – I thought it was partly nostalgic, partly jokey, but it was published at exam time and people obviously thought that it would be useful for parents wanting to help kids with their revision. That hadn't been my intention at all, but it was a real bonus. So revamping it in an 'activity book' format seemed both fun and potentially useful. I suspect most people keep my books in the loo (I know a number of my friends do), but that’s fine too. 

The questions in the book cover a whole range of topics, how did you decide what to include?  I did a lot of radio interviews for the original book and was surprised to discover that what most people wanted to talk about was maths, because it brought back such horrid memories. The chapters are roughly subjects that most of us are forced to do for GCSE or (if you're as old as me) O level, so part of the point is to recall things we hated, like Pythagoras and apostrophes and (a personal bugbear) Wuthering Heights. Apart from that, it had to be something that interested me (well hey, it's my book). 

Did you purposely set out to create a quiz book that was ‘a little different’ from the usual Question and Answer formats? Yes, absolutely. This has multiple choice/mix and match questions and 'identify places on the map' questions and ‘what's happening in this diagram?’ questions, so it's also more interesting to look at than some conventional quiz books.

Tell us a little bit about any experience you have with quizzing? I set quizzes for a while about a hundred years ago, then didn't do much for years. About ten years ago some friends and friends-of-friends from work got together and started going to a pub quiz in a place I had better not name. The organiser was very sweet but often got things wrong and one particular friend and I would argue with him (waste of time) and then spend a lot of the following morning sending each other angry emails. My friend knows everything there is to know about horse racing and it was amazing how often it came up and how often the quiz master got it wrong. After a while we stopped getting cross and it just became funny; at the risk of sounding immodest we often use to win anyway and we'd pour our winnings back over the bar – which is surely what pub quizzes are all about.   

Has the success of the original reference books surprised you? The nostalgic look was part of it; the timing was part of it. But funnily enough I think the real interest is from people who may be quite young but still have a feeling that the country generally and educational standards in particular are going to the dogs. There’s another book in the series called My Grammar and I (or should that be ‘Me’?), which I co-wrote. I've done a lot of radio about that too and doing a radio phone-in on the subject of grammar and English usage is the easiest way I know to make a living: people ring up and say, ‘What really drives me mad is…’ – and it could be anything from the greengrocer’s apostrophe in banana’s and tomatoes’ to split infinitives to txtspk. Then all I have to do is murmur sympathetically and they do all the talking. And these people aren’t all 93, by any means. 

How is your own general knowledge and did you find writing the book to be a learning process? I come from a family of crossword solvers and trivia lovers: all my life I've been a great one for looking things up, just for the sake of it. I like stuff. I've also edited general non-fiction books for 30 years, so I've read about all sorts of things, from Douglas aircraft to Rupert Bear to dinosaurs, that I wouldn't necessarily have chosen. I remember the tip of the iceberg of all these things, but if I remembered the whole lot I could sink the Titanic. Having said that, I'm ashamed now to say that I was bored rigid by geography at schooland rubbish at science, so writing about either of those subjects always teaches me quite a lot. Which I then promptly forget, of course. 

If you were to appear on Mastermind, what would your specialist subject be? I'd like to say something clever here, but it would probably be the Regency romance novels of Georgette Heyer. My comfort reading in times of stress and I do know several of them almost off by heart. How sad is that?

Further information about Caroline can be found at  carolinetaggart.co.uk/books

Here is a link to buy the book on Amazon...