Remember Me? -D- Trivia Quiz

Answer: Edouard Daladier

He was one of the leaders who helped sign away Czech defences at Munich in 1938, he also led France in the early part of World War II before being replaced by Paul Reymond. Arrested by the puppet Vichy government in 1942, he was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp and held there till the end of World War II.

After surviving the war, he served as a member of the National Assembly from 1946 until his resignation in 1958, before passing away in 1970 at the age of 86 and is buried in the famous cemetery of Pčre-Lachaise.

Answer: Eugene Debs

A militant socialist, Debs also founded the Social Democratic Party running for President on five occasions between 1900 and 1920. A pacifist, he was imprisoned in 1918 for sedition (a notion of inciting by words or writings disaffection towards the state or constituted authority) and stood for election in 1920 whilst still in prison. He died in 1926 at the age of 70.

Answer: Karl Dönitz

In 1916, six years after entering the German Navy, Dönitz (Doenitz) joined the submarine (U-boat) service seeing action against Allied merchantmen. When the U-boat arm was restored under Hitler in 1935, Dönitz was given command and conducted a successful campaign against enemy shipping after 1939. By early 1943 it seemed that the British were facing defeat, Dönitz was appointed Commander in Chief of the German Navy in March 1943; in April 1945 he was appointed Hitler's successor and, as such, authorised Germany's unconditional surrender. He was tried as a war criminal and found guilty of 'Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; and crimes against the laws of war.'

He was sentenced to ten year in Spandau Prison. On his release in 1956 he retired to write two books, 'Zehn Jahre, Zwanzig Tage (Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days)' and 'Mein wechselvolles Leben (My Ever-Changing Life)'. They both had limited success the former being printed in English. He however, was unrepentant for his role during World War II and wrote in his memoirs (the former book stated above) about Himmler's betrayal:

"The betrayer of military secrets is a pariah, despised by every man and every nation. Even the enemy whom he serves has no respect for him, but merely uses him. Any nation which is not uncompromisingly unanimous in its condemnation of this type of treachery is undermining the very foundations of its own state, whatever its form of government may be."

Dönitz died in 1980 of a heart attack aged 89.

Answer: Theodore Dreiser

Dreiser's work 'American Tragedy' developed a naturalist account of the often violent impact of the modern social environment upon individual identity. His later work increasingly moved towards a socialist solution to the naturalist predicament.

He married in 1898 and despite separating from his wife he never divorced her. He was the twelfth of thirteen children and his older brother Paul Dreiser had a career writing popular songs of the day and will always be regarded for his dealing with the gritty reality of life.

Answer: Miles Davis

First coming to prominence with a nine piece band in the late 1940s, Davis's contribution was immediately original, with a fragile tone, often muted, and much subtler than the contemporary sound. It was at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955 with a band featuring John Coltrane on tenor sax that he made it big, ushering in a new style which began to challenge the bebop sound. Later orchestrations by Gil Evans showed his increasingly sparse style made him the fashionable and chic 'King of Cool'. He made a series of stylistic changes in subsequent album releases, and then launched the jazz-rock movement with the 1969 album 'In A Silent Way' packing out rock venues at a time when jazz had begun to lose popularity amongst the young.

Miles Dewey Davis III was born May 1926 in the Alton, Illinois a small city that also saw the birth of Martin Luther King's assassin James Earl Ray; he died in September 1991 at age 65 and was buried in The Bronx, New York.

Answer: Dixie Dean

Born in 1907, William Ralph Dean can without doubt be regarded as one of English football's greatest striker. In a career that started at Tranmere Rovers and saw him play for Everton, Notts County, Sligo Rovers and England, Dean's record is one of astonishing quality.

He represented England 16 times scoring 18 goals, which no other English International with similar games played, can boast in terms of goals.
What was impressive was that in 1927 he scored 60 goals in 39 matches and led Everton to the Championship. He went on to score an amazing 349 goals in just 399 matches for the Merseyside club.

Dean actually hated his nickname 'Dixie' given to him by the fans who coined the phrase due to his dark complexion, akin to that of someone from Mexico, and despite the moniker sticking he preferred to be called Bill.

He remains a legend in not just the history of Everton Football Club, but in the game as a whole. He was voted to 68th place as one of the greatest 100 footballers in world football for the 20th century.

Answer: Christian Dior

Dior had a relatively late start in the fashion industry: he gave up his studies in political science to study music but instead spent much of his time travelling and running an art gallery. In 1935 he began selling fashion sketches to Paris newspapers and gained experience in design working with Lucien Lelong until, in 1942, cotton magnate Marcel Boussac offered him the chance to open his own couture house.

Dior's first collection in 1947, originally called the 'Carolle Line' was nicknamed 'The New Look' and featured huge skirts on tiny waists with boned bodices which exaggerated the female form. He later introduced the stand up collar, coolie hats, and the popular 'Princess' line which gave the illusion of a high waist. In 1954 Dior named his collection the 'H' line; the 'A' and 'Y' lines followed a year later. Favouring black, navy blue and white, Dior accessorised his clothes with brooches pinned at the waist, neck and shoulders and in the fifties introduced the fashion for several ropes of pearls wound around the neck. He was also responsible in some way for the revival of men's suits.

Dior died in 1957 due to a heart attack brought on by an extreme sexual encounter with two men.

Answer: Deng Xiao Ping

This hard hitting reformist never officially led China. Despite being in practice the leader of the Communist Party he never sat in the same seat of power that once his compatriot Chairman Mao did.

However, in the early 1960s he gained popularity that Mao was finding hard to bare, and after this statement by Deng in 1961, "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice" Mao waited to hammer home his ideas and launched the Cultural Revolution that saw Deng lose his position of power.

Deng however, was a determined soul and was back in as Vice Premier after Premier Zhou Enlai who was dying of cancer managed to persuade Mao to take Deng back, it succeeded.

After numerous deaths in the Communist Party (and later that of Mao), the Gang of Four led by Mao's estranged wife Jiang Qing and her associates Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen managed to oust Deng from power but not before the end of Mao's life. A power struggle occurred between the Gang of Four and the alliance of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Ye Jianying.

However, just before Mao's death in 1976 he turned against the group and within two years their fight for power had ended.

Deng came back again and assumed his role within the Chinese Communist Party with verve and hard handed attitude that to this day is still enforced in China. Even after his death in 1997, his policies that were laid down were still being used and his legacy shows him as one of the 20th centuries great Marxist, Proletarian Revolutionary, statesman, military strategist, and diplomat.

Answer: Kirk Douglas

It was after a stint on Broadway that Douglas appeared in his first film, 'The Strange Love of Martha Ivers' (1946), playing opposite Barbara Stanwyck. But it was not until 'Champion' (1949), in which he played an immoral prize-fighter that the Douglas' intensity was put on display, and it made him a star. He turned down flashier films in order to make 'Young Man with a Horn' (1950), the story of Bix Beiderbecke, rapidly establishing himself as one of the new post war breed of masculine movie idols. In 1956 he formed his own company which gave him new freedom to make films such as 'Paths of Glory' (1957) and 'The Vikings' (1958), with Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis. Despite his movie success, Douglas retained an interest in the Broadway stage, and in 1963 he appeared in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.

Despite his massive appeal he never won an Academy Award for any film he was involved with, however, he did receive a special Oscar in 1996 for "50 years as a moral and creative force in the motion picture community".

Answer: Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky

The founder of the Cheka, (the forerunner of the infamous KGB), Dzerzhinsky was the architect of the Soviet system of repression. He was born a Polish aristocrat and became a fanatical Christian before converting to Bolshevism.

A veteran of the abortive 1905 revolution, he formed Lenin's secret police initially to prevent 'social hooliganism,' but he soon honed it into the sinister, all powerful machine for eliminating the state's enemies which Lavrentiy Beria would later inherit with such terrible consequences.