Block D Questions : Art & Literature

1.       Which American author wrote, in a novel of 1851: “A whale ship was my Yale college and my Harvard”?

2.       The dancer Jane Avril was immortalized in posters for the Moulin Rouge painted by which French artist?

3.       The opening words of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ tell us that “Mole has been working hard all morning…” – doing what?

4.       What is the title of Robert Browning’s poem which begins, “Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there”?

5.       Subtitled ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’, which 1895 play revolves around the courtships and betrothals of Jack Worthing and Algy Moncrieff?

6.       Which musical term describes an unaccompanied exhibition passage in the style of an improvisation, inserted by the soloist at the climax of a concerto?

7.       Which play by Neil Simon was successfully adapted for the screen, and has as its central characters the ageing vaudeville performers Al Lewis and Willie Clarke?

8.       What name is given to a drinking song found frequently in 19^th century Italian opera, with perhaps the best-known example appearing in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’?

9.       Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No.1 in D, ‘the Classical’, was written in parody of the style of which 18^th century Austrian composer?

10.   Alexander the Great, Pericles and Coriolanus are among the subjects in which Roman author’s ‘Parallel Lives’, containing biographies of 23 Greek politicians and soldiers, paired with 23 Roman lives that offer points of similarity?

11.   What number is usually given the sonnet of Shakespeare’s, which opens with the lines: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’?

12.   Born in London of an anglo-irish family in 1870, which novelist became a member if the IRA, and was executed in 1922? He is now primarily remembered for the thriller ‘The Riddle of the Sands’, first published in 1903?

13.   “I’m not an artist, I am a man who paint’s” is a remark attributed to which painter, most closely associated with his industrial scenes of Salford, the city in which he lived for almost all of his life?

14.   The ‘Snow Maiden’, first performed in 1882, is an opera by which Russian composer, born in 1844?

15.   In which novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1887, does Giles Winterbourne fall in love with Grace Melbury, but is unable to marry her when he suffers financial misfortune and she becomes his social superior?

16.   In a play by Shakespeare, which character’s madness becomes apparent as she sings: “He is dead and gone, Lady/He is dead and gone,/At his head a grass-green turf;/At his heels a stone.”

17.   Which country is a crescent shaped island containing 54 cities sited at least 24 miles apart, each of less than 100,000 people, and was created in a work of fiction which first appeared in 1516?

18.   At the height of the American Civil War, which author did Abraham Lincoln greet with the words, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,” referring to her anti-slavery novel of 1852, ‘Uncle Tom Cabin’s’?

19.   Which English poet wrote: “Sweet is revenge – especially to women”, in his work ‘Don Juan’, published between 1819 and 1824?

20.   Although ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ was the first of the 7 Narnia books by CS Lewis to be published, which novel was the penultimate one to be written but comes first in terms of the Narnian chronology?

Answers

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