Arts & Books Mixed Bag 16 Trivia Quiz

Answer: L.S. Lowry

Laurence Stephen Lowry was born in 1887 in the Manchester suburb of Stretford. Many of his paintings depict life in the industrial northwest of England in the mid-20th century and, particularly, in the Salford borough of Pendlebury, where he lived for much of his life.

Many of L.S. Lowry's best-known works are displayed at "The Lowry", an art gallery named for him and located near the end of the Manchester Ship Canal on Salford Quays.

There have been two notable musical tributes to the inimitable style of L.S. Lowry's work: Status Quo with their 1968 single "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and Brian and Michael, who reached number one in the UK singles chart in 1978 with "Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs".

Answer: The Charge of the Light Brigade

The complete opening verse is:
'Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred.'

Written by Britain's Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, on December 2, 1854 and published a week later, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" relates the disastrous events that had occurred in October of that same year at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War.

Answer: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"

Born in Surrey in southern England in 1894, Aldous Leonard Huxley is best-known as the author of "Brave New World", published in 1932. Set in London in the year 2540, the novel outlines a society in which humanity is carefree, healthy and technologically advanced, with warfare and poverty eliminated and everyone permanently happy.

"Brave New World" featured prominently in numerous polls and "Best of" list published around the turn of the century. In a 1999 'Modern Library' list of the "100 best English-language novels of the 20th century" it ranked fifth. It came in at number 87 in the BBC's survey "The Big Read".

The alternatives were all published at least 15 years after "Brave New World". Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" came our in 1949, Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" in 1953 and Golding's "Lord of the Flies" in 1954.

Answer: The Big Sleep

Born in Chicago in 1888, Raymond Thornton Chandler only turned his hand to novel writing after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Great Depression. His first full-length novel, "The Big Sleep", published in 1939, introduced the world to the archetypical hardboiled detective, Philip Marlowe.

On the big screen, Marlowe has famously been played by Humphrey Bogart (in the 1948 of Chandler's debut novel) and by Robert Mitchum (twice, in the 1978 version of "The Big Sleep" and in "Farewell, My Lovely" in 1975).

Chandler completed seven novels. An eighth, "Poodle Springs" was incomplete when Chandler died in 1959 and was finished by fellow-crime writer Robert B. Parker, the creator of the private detective, Spenser (for Hire).

Answer: John le Carré

Published in 1983, "The Little Drummer Girl" was the tenth novel by the master of the spy story, John le Carré.

Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, Dorset in 1931, he worked for both MI5 and MI6 before he began writing novels under the pen name of John le Carré. His first spy novel, "Call for the Dead" in which he first introduced his most famous creation, George Smiley, was published in 1961.

Answer: Fate

Four of Beethoven's symphonies have been given names as well as numbers. Symphony Number 5 in C minor, which took four years to write and was premiered in 1808, is known as "Fate". It is also sometimes called the "Victory Symphony".

It is almost certainly coincidental that 30 years after this piece was written, Samuel Morse assigned the rhythm of Beethoven's opening bars, "dit-dit-dit-dah" to the letter "V" in his code, V also being the Roman numeral for five. It has been claimed that the pattern for this most famous of all symphonic openings came to Beethoven from hearing the song of a yellowhammer as he walked through a Vienna park.

Of the alternatives, "Eroica" is Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, "Pastoral" is Symphony No. 6 in F major, and "Choral" is Symphony No. 9 in D minor.

Answer: Nero Wolfe

Armchair detective Nero Wolfe and his Doctor Watsonesque sidekick Archie Goodwin made their literary debuts in Rex Stout's 1934 novel "Fer-de-Lance". Forty-six full-length novels culminated with "A Family Affair", published in 1975, the year of the author's death, although "Death Times Three", a collection of three Nero Wolfe novellas, was published posthumously in 1985.

During his career as a an eccentric detective, the exact address of Nero Wolfe's brownstone on West 35th Street remains a mystery. In all, a total of ten different addresses are given, ranging from 506 West 35th in "Over My Dead Body" (the seventh Nero Wolfe novel published in 1940) to 938 West 35th in "Death of a Doxy" in 1966.

Of the alternatives, Sara Paretsky's Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski lives in Chicago IL; Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone lives and works in the fictional California town of Santa Teresa; and James Patterson's Alex Cross lives in Washington D.C.

Answer: Juno

The ancient Roman goddess responsible for overseeing the well-being of the women of Rome, Juno was the patron goddess of the Eternal City. Often called Regina (Latin for "Queen"), she is one of three gods worshipped on Capitoline Hill (along with Jupiter and Minerva).

Juno's Greek equivalent is Hera, the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus. In the Etruscan pantheon, the supreme goddess Uni is the equivalent.

Of the alternatives, Pomona is a wood nymph and the goddess of fruitful abundance; Flora is the goddess of flowers of the spring; and Minerva is the goddess of wisdom and the sponsor of arts.

Answer: Bram Stoker's "Dracula"

Published in 1897, the Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker introduced one of the most memorable of all literary characters, the vampire Count Dracula. Although he did not create the vampire concept, Stoker unquestionably defined it in modern literary terms.

In the century and more since "Dracula" was published, the character has appeared in some form or another in more than 200 films, a close second only to Sherlock Holmes.

Answer: Alessandro Scarlatti

Born in the northern Sicilian coastal city of Palermo in 1660, Alessandro Scarlatti was the founder of the Neapolitan school of opera, although he is known today for his chamber cantatas as well as his operatic works. In a writing career than spanned more than 40 years, he was a prestigious composer, completing more than 65 full-length operas.

One of his earliest, "Il Pompeo", premiered in 1683 when he was just 22 years of age. It was his fourth opera but the first to tackle a 'grand subject'. "Tigrane" or, to give it its full title 'Tigrane, o vero L'egual impegno d'amore e di fede ("Tigranes, or The Equal Ties of Love and Faith") was one of Scarlatti's later works, premiering in 1715. Considered one of his finest works, it manages to combine a serious main plot interspersed with some notable comic scenes. "Griselda" is the last of Scarlatti's surviving operas, written only shortly before his death in 1725.