for which major event of 1951?
23. Shakespeare’s character Autolycus is described as ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’. In which play does he appear?
24. Which 1979 film was advertised with the tag-line ‘In space, no one can hear you scream’?
25. Born Karoline Blamauer in Austria at the turn of the twentieth century, the future wife of the composer Kurt Weill became known by what stage name?
26. Which European city was the birthplace of the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi?
27. Which measurement of length, in the UK, can be defined as a tenth of a nautical mile?
28. Who was the author of the 1750s work The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director?
29. What’s the popular name for the furcula, a forked bony structure in the bodies of birds, to which the muscles of flight are attached?
30. In the musical West Side Story, what are the names of the two rival gangs, equivalent to the Montagues and the Capulets in the source story Romeo and Juliet?
31. The Battles of the Boyne in 1690, Gettysburg in 1863, and The Somme in 1916, all began on which date of the calendar?
32. The first chapter of which novel, first published in 1954, is called ‘The Sound of the Shell’?
33. Which English jeweller lends his name to the alloy of copper and zinc which he invented in the early 18th century?
34. Although her achievements in the Crimean War had for many years been eclipsed by those of Florence Nightingale, which Jamaica-born nursing pioneer was voted top of a 21st century poll to find the one hundred greatest black Britons?
35. To which famous couple was Variety magazine referring, with its June 1956 headline ‘Egghead Weds Hourglass’?
36. What is the standard unit of luminous flux, used to measure the light that passes through an area in a second?
37. Which English king was defeated and captured at the Battle of Lincoln, in 1141?
38. Martin Cooper, a Chicago engineer employed by the Motorola company, is credited with being the first person ever to do what, on the 3rd April 1973?
39. What is the simplest proper fraction that expresses the decimal value 0.85?
40. Which aromatic herb gives its distinct flavour to Earl Grey tea?
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1. Exhibited in 1849, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first major canvas The Girlhood of Mary, Virgin bore his signature, the date, and the letters P.R.B. What did P.R.B. stand for?
2. Which prolific female novelist who died in the year 2000 was married twice, both times to men with the surname McCorquodale?
3. What’s the name of the gorge, descending to more than 36,000 feet below sea level, that marks the lowest point of the Mariana Trench in the north-western Pacific, and is thus the deepest point anywhere on the Earth’s surface?
4. The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice are among the works of art criticism by which writer, who died in 1900?
5. Which writer, himself a noted theatre critic, defined a critic as ‘a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car’?
6. Obtained from the tree of the species Quercus suber, what material forms the centre of the best-quality cricket balls?
7. ‘Night-writing’ – a letter code devised in 1819 by the French army captain Charles Barbier for passing secret messages silently in the dark – gave rise to which form of communication still in use today?
8. The words ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’, used by T. S. Eliot as an epigraph for his poem ‘The Hollow Men’, are taken from which novel first published in 1899?
9. The same novel in turn inspired a movie of 1979, in which a character played by Dennis Hopper refers back to the final words of Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’. Which film is that?
10. The Hungarian ballerina Romola de Pulszky married a dancer and choreographer in Buenos Aires in 1913, and published a biography in 1952 chronicling the latter years of her husband’s life. Who was he?
11. Which Greek sculptor, active in the 5th century BC, created the huge Statue of Zeus at Olympia which was named one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and also supervised the friezes for the Parthenon which are now preserved as the ‘Elgin Marbles’?
12. Which two seas are connected by the Suez Canal?
13. Which American broadcaster, who died in 2009, used to sign off his news programmes with the phrase ‘And that’s the way it is’?
14. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which character does Alice encounter sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah?
15. In seventeenth and eighteenth-century London, Garraways, Jonathan’s and Lloyd’s were all famous what?
16. How many oxygen atoms are there in a single molecule of sulphuric acid?
17. Ansel Adams is a renowned name in which of the arts?
18. Having written many of their biggest hit songs, including ‘Easy’, ‘Still’ and ‘Three Times A Lady’, the soul singer Lionel Richie left which group to pursue a solo career in the 1980s?
19. What’s the common English name for the species of small bird whose taxonomic name is Troglodytes troglodytes?
20. Which Arabic word meaning benefits or a source of improvement, has come to be widely used in Indian cookery to mean a mixture of spices – and can be preceded in familiar phrases by the words garam or tikka?
21. In Mary Shelley’s novel, what forename did she give to Dr Frankenstein, the ‘Modern Prometheus’?
22. How is the artist born in Crete in 1541, and named Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known?
23. Which term, originally a nonsense word invented by Edward Lear, is now used for a three-pronged pickle fork, shaped like a spoon and with one sharp edge?
24. A 22-storey triangular-shaped tower on the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street in Manhattan, built by the architect Daniel H. Burnham in 1902, is Manhattan’s oldest remaining skyscraper, and was added to the US National Register of Historic Places in 1979. By what name is it commonly known?
25. The last recorded words of a certain British monarch were ‘My dear boy, this is death’. Who made this astute utterance, and then died, on 26th June 1830?
26. The 19th century Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox is said to have been