On Tuesday night, 18 crack teams of students convened at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery for the inaugural iQuiz. Each team had battled through regional heats in November, lured by an unforgettable prize: a two-week trek across America.

He designed the first decimal coin, and now Virginia Ironside’s father is getting one of his own

Writers suffer different levels of public amnesia. James Hadley Chase's name still sounds familiar to many who have forgotten his books, and there's a reason for that: the name became synonymous with a certain kind of disreputable crime novel. Yet he was born in the Edwardian era. Why, then, do we associate him with something too racy to be kept on the family bookshelves?

I hadn't been to Rules since the mid-1980s and all I remembered of the place was a heavy atmosphere of dark wood, hefty carpets, thick sauces and sturdy-bottomed English lunchers. Heaviness was my main impression; but then history, of a dense, richly-flavoured kind, hangs around Rules like mayoral chains. It's England's oldest restaurant, founded by Thomas Rule in 1798. It's been owned by only three families in 200 years. It's seen off nine English monarchs. It turns up in several novels: the adulterous couple in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair enjoyed their first lurve tryst here over a furtive dish of seductive onions.

As the late Sir John Betjeman might have written: