It was the moment I had been dreading. Monday night and The Times team was in a tie for first place at the annual PEN quiz with HarperCollins and The Guardian. The heavy burden of winning and bringing home the trophy for the second time would fall to me. A question about the origin of the word “bombast” elicited only wrong guesses. Another came and, as the words “Francis II” “bought” and “portrait” came out of host David Mitchell’s mouth, I spat out “Mona Lisa!” Correct. (It was something I had read in a book about art that came free with a newspaper.) Winning the PEN quiz , the annual fundraising event for the writers’ charity, involved a lot of luck. But, good fortune aside, how do you win any quiz? The answer is so obvious I feel idiotic saying it: you must know the answers. Actually, a quiz is a general knowledge lottery. The more tickets you buy, i.e, the more facts you collect, the more likely your numbers will come up. If you want to win a humdrum pub quiz, you can bore yourself senseless by rote-learning trivia books. But to win the kind of quizzes in which participants weep at the sheer difficulty takes a lot more skill than simple “What is the capital of Croatia?” recall.

The most interesting kind of questions may appear maddeningly obscure but, because they have been laden with enough clues, require deduction and lateral thinking. A question about which Eurovision Song Contest winner appears in the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine may appear absurd, but once you ponder the song’s content, there is only one feasible answer — Brotherhood of Man. It also helps to know the tricks of the quiz-writing trade: the little tics and techniques setters employ. Aside from penning quizzes for The Times, I’m one of the University Challenge setters. I fill dozens of notebooks with potential material, gleaned from every medium.

There is, however, no substitute for serious participation. I am a long-time regular on the quizzing circuit, a series of national and international events where competition is fierce and the questions always taxing. Recent performances have ensured my regular selection for the four-man England team.

Playing against the best will prepare you for any quiz, and my regime boils down to this: read as widely as possible and remember as much as you can.

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