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Bookwise

Can you identify these characters named Edmund? In which books do they appear, and who are the authors?

1 Following his sister Lucy through a cupboard into a strange place, he met a coldly beautiful witch. She bribed him, with a hot drink and Turkish delight, to bring his sisters and brother to meet her.

2 Two of the king's daughters were in love with this bastard son of a duke. He had sworn love to both, but planned that both should die. This happened. He invented charges against his brother Edgar, legitimate son of the duke, to make their father hate Edgar.

3 Younger son of Sir Thomas, he was a man of humility and compassion. He was saved from marriage to a snobbish, flighty lady when she rejected him on hearing he planned to become a clergyman. She considered "the poor chaplain" not worth looking at.

4 His friend Terry was indifferent to food and skinny, but this nine-year-old liked food and was fat. Arriving in a strange wood, they were separated, as members of two warring nations. At a conference, they became spokesmen for thin and for fat delegates. Edmund enjoyed big meals provided when he was secretary to Prince Vorapuff.

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5 In a personal account of his tormented 19th-century childhood, home life was dominated by his parents' fanatical religion. Amongst Liverpool's Plymouth Brethren, fiction was banned. A Quaker stepmother softened his father's strict regime.

6 This handsome man loved and eloped with Barbara, a sweet but immature girl who prized his good looks. But she unwisely chose to leave him when he became disfigured.

7 In 855, he became boy king of East Anglia at a time of the Saxon wars against the Danes. But he was captured by the Great Heathen Army. He talked himself into martyrdom when he tried to convince Ivar the Boneless of the greatness of God.

8 A poet wrote: "When I doubt the genius of [this man], I picture him with his laurels bedraggled, A butt for louts: Aubrey, in his Brief Lives, had written 'They made him damnable drunke at Somerset House, where, at the water stayres, he ... had a cruell fall.' "

Bookwise answers: 1 Edmund Pevensie; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis); Puffin 2 Edmund; King Lear (Shakespeare); Penguin 3 Edmund Bertram; Mansfield Park (Austen); HarperCollins 4 Edmund Double; Fattipuffs and Thinifers (Maurois); Norman Denny 5 Edmund Gosse; Father and Son (Gosse); Penguin 6 Edmund Willowes; Barbara of the House of Grebe - A Group of Noble Dames (Hardy); St Martin's Press 7 Edmund the Martyr; The Last Kingdom; The Saxon Stories (Cornwell); HarperCollins 8 Edmund Waller; Brief Lives in Not So Brief; The Best of Ogden Nash; Methuen