What's in a Name? Titles, Nicknames & Aliases Quiz

Answer: El Greco

Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) received his initial artistic training on Crete, then worked in Venice and Rome, before settling in Spain where he acquired the nickname by which he is remembered: El Greco ('The Greek'). He was noted for his striking use of colour and the elongated faces, fingers and figures of his subjects, a technique which he may have developed to counter the foreshortening caused by placement of his work high on church walls but was also carried over into his more intimate portraiture. (Some art historians have suggested visual impairment as a possible explanation for his style).

Praxiteles was a Greek sculptor of the 4th century BC.
Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro) was a 15th century Dominican friar and Italian Renaissance painter.
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) was an artist of the Venetian School of the 16th century.

Answer: Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn's place of birth and original name remain uncertain though she is believed to have been born in England around 1640. In the mid-1660s, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, she became a spy in the Netherlands for the government of Charles II, using one or more code names. Around this time she acquired the surname Behn, possibly through marriage to a Dutch or German merchant. Under the name Astrea or Aphra Behn she became a prolific and popular professional author, continuing to publish until her death in 1689. Amongst many other original works, including prose fiction such as 'Oroonoko', she wrote and staged 19 plays. However, by the late 18th century her work was considered too indecent for public performance and the 'Biographic Britannica' noted that her abilities "having been applied to the purposes of impiety and vice ought not only to be held up in the utmost detestation but consigned if possible to eternal oblivion". (Quoted in the introduction to Behn's play 'The Lucky Chance', London: Virago Press, 1981.)

William Congreve, like Behn, was a Restoration playwright.
Eliza Haywood (born Elizabeth Fowler) was an 18th century novelist, playwright, and poet.
Acton Bell was the nom de plume used by 19th century author, Anne Bronte.

Answer: Madame de Pompadour

In 1745 while married to a young government official named d'Étiolles, Jeanne Antoinette was introduced to Louis XV. She became his principal and most influential mistress and was raised to the aristocracy as the Marquise de Pompadour. For nearly twenty years Madame de Pompadour acted as informal adviser to the king and as a noted patron of art, architecture, and of philosophers including Voltaire. She died in 1764, aged 42.

Nell Gwyn was an actress and mistress to Britain's Charles II.
Madame Defarge is a fictional character from Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities'.
Wallis Simpson (born Bessie Wallis Warfield) was companion to Edward VIII and became his wife in 1937, following his abdication in late 1936.

Answer: Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great (1729-1796) was the longest ruling of Russia's women leaders. When her husband, Peter III, was murdered shortly after his abdication she assumed power, following the precedent set by Catherine I who had reigned after the death of her husband, Peter the Great, in 1725. Catherine the Great presided over Russian territorial expansion and the period known as the Russian Enlightenment. She is also remembered for her complex personal life and her many favourites, including the soldier and statesman, Grigory Potemkin.

Isabella I of Castile (1451-1504) and her husband Ferdinand II of Aragon reigned jointly over much of Spain. Their daughter, Catherine of Aragon, was the first wife of England's King Henry VIII.
Maria Theresa (1717-1780) was the only woman ruler of the Habsburg Empire. She and her husband, Francis I, were the parents of the French Queen, Marie Antoinette.
Victoria (1819-1901) reigned as Queen of the United Kingdom from 1837 and as Empress of India from 1876.

Answer: The Duke of Wellington

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) performed poorly at school but began to show promise in early adulthood after joining the army. He distingushed himself as a military strategist in India and went on to achieve heroic status during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, eventually reaching the rank of Field Marshal. In 1814, the year before the Battle of Waterloo, Wellesley was granted a Dukedom. In later life, as a Tory politician, he served twice as Prime Minister.

Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, was a naval hero of the Napoleonic Wars.
James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, was a courageous but sometimes less than competent army officer who is best remembered for having led the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, was a writer and conservative British politician of Sephardic Jewish background, who was twice Prime Minister under Queen Victoria.

Answer: Mata Hari

Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in the Netherlands in 1876. Her unhappy marriage collapsed in 1902 and she established herself as a dancer and courtesan in Paris, using the name Mata Hari to suggest eastern ethnicity. During WWI her frequent travel between western European countries aroused suspicion and French intelligence intercepted German radio messages which the Allies believed identified Mata Hari as a spy for Germany. She was arrested in Paris in 1917. Although the evidence presented at her trial was inconclusive, Mata Hari's lawyers were prevented from representing her effectively and she was convicted and executed on 15 October. Documents which came to light in the late 20th century support the conclusion that Mata Hari was indeed a German agent.

Edith Cavell was a British nurse who was shot by the Germans in WWI for assisting Allied soldiers to escape from occupied Belgium.
'Josephine B' was the WWII Allied codename for a joint Free French and British Special Operations Executive (SOE) attack on the transformer station at Pessac in June 1941.
'The White Mouse' was the Gestapo codename for British agent, Nancy Wake, during WWII. Wake was a New Zealand-born Australian who was living in France when war broke out in 1939.

Answer: Stalin

Born in 1879, Iosif Dzhugashvili's difficult childhood left him with facial scarring as a result of smallpox and a left arm severely damaged in an accident. In 1899 he was expelled from the seminary and became interested in Marxist politics, eventually joining Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks. As a revolutionary, Dzhugashvili adopted several noms de guerre, settling on Stalin (meaning 'steel') by 1912. In 1922, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee. Lenin's death in 1924 left Stalin free to consolidate Soviet power in himself. Although Stalin's policies transformed the Soviet Union from an agricultural to an industrial economy, the social and human cost was high, with huge numbers of Russians suffering starvation due to agricultural mismanagement, or imprisonment or execution in widespread purges of internal 'enemies'. Stalin died in 1953 and his successors rapidly distanced themselves from his legacy. [Note: there are several possible transliterations of Stalin's birth name from Cyrillic into English. I have used the spelling given in the English language version of Edvard Radzinsky's biography 'Stalin'.]

Grigori Rasputin was a Russian peasant mystic who acquired influence with the ruling Romanov family under the last Tsar, Nicholas II. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916.
Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) was a Russian communist revolutionary and politician who was a central figure in the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the Soviet Republic.
Marshal Tito (born Josip Broz) was a Yugoslav partisan leader during WWII and later became Prime Minister, and then President, of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Answer: Ataturk

Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) led the Turkish National Movement which led to the founding of the Republic of Turkey following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WWI. After resigning from the Ottoman Army in 1919 he played a central role in the Turkish War of Independence, aiming to protect the interests of the Turkish majority in the proposed partition of the dying Empire. The war is associated with atrocities including the massacre of several thousand Armenians at the time of the Battle of Marash in which Mustafa Kemal's troops defeated the French Armenian Legion. (An estimated 1.5 million of the Armenian population had already died in the Ottoman Empire's Armenian Genocide of 1915 onwards.) After victory in the War of Independence, Mustafa Kemal introduced measures designed to establish Turkey as a democratic secular state. These included women's rights and sweeping educational reforms. He served as the first Prime Minister and first President of Turkey and was honoured with the title 'Ataturk' (Father of the Turks) in 1934.

Suleiman the Magnificent was the longest reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (reigned 1520-1566).
Aristotle Onassis was a Turkish-born Greek shipping magnate in the 20th century.
Yasar Kemal (born Kemal Sadik Gokceli) was a Turkish author of Kurdish origin whose best known work is the 1955 novel 'Memed, My Hawk'.

Answer: Lord Haw Haw

In 1921 Joyce, then in his late teens, moved from Ireland to England where he became increasing interested in right-wing political ideology. In 1932 he joined the British Union of Fascists in which he rose to the position of deputy leader and directed the movement's progaganda efforts. Joyce was dismissed by the BUF's leader, Oswald Mosley, and moved to Germany shortly before the outbreak of WWII, becoming a German citizen in 1940. Until the end of the war, he made the infamous propaganda broadcasts designed to undermine British morale, for which he acquired the nickname 'Lord Haw Haw'. Captured by British troops in 1945 he was tried for high treason at the Old Bailey and hanged at Wandsworth Prison in 1946. His conviction was controversial due to his ambiguous citizenship status. However, the prosecution argued successfully that he held a British passport at the time he began working for the Germans (though he had obtained the passport by misrepresenting his nationality) and therefore owed allegiance to the British Crown.

The name Tokyo Rose was applied by the Allies to several English speaking women (including US citizen, Iva Toguri) who broadcast propaganda for the Japanese during WWII.
'Snow' was the MI5 codename for Arthur Owens, a WWII Welsh double agent who worked for the Allies.
'Gomer' was the Russian codename for Donald Maclean. Maclean was one of the Cambridge Five, a group of British civil servants who had been recruited while at university in the 1930s to spy for the Soviet Union.

Answer: Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa, now formally known as The Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, was born in Skopje in the Ottoman Empire in 1910. She began her religious novitiate with the Sisters of Loreto in India in 1929 and, on taking her vows, chose the name Teresa in honour of St Therese de Lisieux. In 1949 Mother Teresa, by now a citizen of India, founded a new religious community to work with the poor and dying of Calcutta. The sisters of the Missionaries of Charity adopted a simple white sari rather than a traditional nun's habit. Although Mother Teresa's philosophical approach to her work, and the sourcing and management of Missionaries of Charity funds, have been the subject of some controversy, she is widely revered for her courage and her care for the desitute over many decades. She died in 1997 and was beatified by the Roman Catholic church in 2003.

Marie Curie (born Maria Salomea Sklodowska) was a Polish-born scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.
British actress Audrey Hepburn (born Audrey Kathleen Ruston) was a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in later life.
Lorde (born Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor) is a New Zealand musician.