Limber up for effortless table talk with our culture quiz

Writers

1. Name the Russian novelist who was sent horrific pictures of car accidents by the KGB in an attempt to trigger a mental breakdown.

2. Which US novelist appeared in The Simpsons with a paper bag on his head?

3. Which South African has won the Booker Prize twice but never bothered to turn up and collect it?

4. Which US novelist changed his name to hide the fact that one of his ancestors had been a judge who sentenced women to death at the Salem witch trials?

5. Which French novelist believed having an orgasm depleted his creative powers and is said to have remarked after making love, “There goes another novel.”

6. Name the only author ever to turn down a Nobel prize.

Artists

7. Who did Jackson Pollock say was so ugly, you’d first have to put a towel over her head before making love to her?

8. Which artist’s work includes an album cover for Lady Gaga and sculptures of Michael Jackson and the Incredible Hulk?

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9. Which artist retaliated against her husband’s infidelity by sleeping with Leon Trotsky?

10. Which artist said: “There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.”?

11. Which photographer and Vogue model was pictured naked in Hitler’s bathtub?

12. The word paparazzo originally comes to us from which of Federico Fellini’s movies, which includes a photographer of that name?

13. Which artist, on being criticised for not working from nature, replied: “I am nature.”?

Writers: the darker side

14. Along with a nappy-cleaning company, what other business did Kurt Vonnegut run before becoming a novelist?

15. William Burroughs killed his wife after they both got drunk and he persuaded her to balance a gin bottle on her head for him to shoot off. He missed the bottle and shot her in the head, but how did he escape being sent to prison?

16. Name the 19th-century writer who, after contracting syphilis and going mad, claimed that his urine was made of diamonds.

17. What were the terms of the contract that the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch signed with his mistress Fanny Pistor?

18. The Anglo-Irish novelist Laurence Sterne’s body was illegally dug up and sold to anatomists at Cambridge University. What made them swiftly reinter him?

19. While suffering a nervous breakdown, novelist Muriel Spark became convinced she was receiving coded messages from which modernist poet?

Philosophers

20. Which Jewish philosopher who was imprisoned in a concentration camp also dated a Nazi?

21. Which German philosopher claimed we could all improve our lives by spending more time in graveyards?

22. When asked on his deathbed if he renounced the devil, which philosopher replied: “This is no time to be making enemies.”?

23. Which philosopher’s name means “broad” in Greek (a reference to this great thinker’s particularly sturdy shoulders)?

24. Which French female philosopher would seduce her female students, then pass them on to her long-term lover, also a French philosopher?

25. Hitler attended the same school as which philosopher?

Stranger than fiction: more writers

26. The song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles was inspired by the work of which dystopian British novelist?

27. Who is the only Nobel Laureate to also have an entry in Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack?

28. When soldiers were searching his house, what did Chilean poet Pablo Neruda say was the only dangerous thing they would find?

29. Which homosexual novelist married his female first cousin before running off with his best man’s 15-year-old son?

30. Name the US novelist who, in 1912, nearly boarded the Titanic but at the last minute decided to save money by switching to a cheaper ship.

31. Which US writer wrote a novel in favour of the prohibition of alcohol then later admitted he wrote it while blind drunk?

Politicians

32. Which famous revolutionary almost survived being hit in the head with an ice-pick?

33. Which French statesman wore 14 nightcaps to protect his head in case he fell out of bed during the night?

34. To whom did the humorist Dorothy Parker leave everything in her will?

35. Who did JFK describe as the most fascinating man he’d ever met?

36. When the US novelist Philip Roth remarked that kissing her was “like kissing a face on a billboard”, who was he talking about?

Scientists

37. What did the pathologist on duty when Albert Einstein died steal from him?

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38. Which book did Sigmund Freud say was “the most significant novel ever written”?

39. Name the famous scientist who predicted that the world would end in 2060.

40. Which scientist left his house one winter’s day to test if stuffing a chicken with snow would help preserve it, only to die of cold himself?

41. After presiding over the world’s first controlled nuclear reaction, which scientist celebrated with a small paper cup of Chianti?

42. Which scientist was hunched over his desk, intent on solving a geometric problem, when a Roman soldier murdered him?

Answers

1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2 Thomas Pynchon

3 J M Coetzee

4 Nathaniel Hawthorne

5 Honoré de Balzac

6 Jean-Paul Sartre

7 Peggy Guggenheim

8 Jeff Koons

9 Frida Kahlo

10 Man Ray

11 Lee Miller

12 La Dolce Vita

13 Jackson Pollock

14 America’s first Saab dealership

15 He said the gun went off accidentally

16 Guy de Maupassant

17 That for the next six months he would be her slave and in return she would wear fur as often as possible

18 One of the surgeons had known Laurence and recognised his corpse

19 T S Eliot

20 Hannah Arendt

21 Martin Heidegger

22 Voltaire

23 Plato

24 Simone de Beauvoir (her lover was Sartre)

25 Wittgenstein

26 J G Ballard

27 Samuel Beckett

28 Poetry

29 André Gide

30 Theodore Dreiser

31 Walt Whitman

32 Leon Trotsky

33 Talleyrand

34 Martin Luther King

35 André Malraux

36 Jackie Kennedy

37 His brain

38 The Brothers Karamazov

39 Isaac Newton

40 Francis Bacon

41 Enrico Fermi

42 Archimedes

Taken from “How to Sound Cultured” by Thomas W Hodgkinson and Hubert van den Bergh, published by Icon, priced £12.99.