Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A Nobel Prize That Arrived Late

Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, but she received it in 2019 - the Swedish Academy postponed that year's award amid a scandal and honoured two laureates the following year. She is one of Poland's most widely translated contemporary writers, and her work often blends history, myth and fragmented storytelling. Flights, published in Polish as Bieguni, interweaves travel narratives with reflections on movement and the human body.

Venus on a Shell

Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted in the mid-1480s, shows the goddess arriving on a seashell, blown toward shore by wind deities. It is one of the earliest large-scale depictions of a classical mythological subject on canvas in Western art, created well before the nude became a common subject again in later centuries. The painting now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The Bicycle That Made Cycling Practical

John Kemp Starley's Rover Safety Bicycle, introduced in 1885, used two wheels of roughly equal size and a chain drive - a design far safer than the towering penny-farthing. Its geometry became the template for virtually every bicycle ridden today. Starley was an English inventor whose Rover company later grew into a major British manufacturer.

Vaduz and the Slavic Language Map

Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein, is a small town of roughly 5,000 people, yet it anchors one of Europe's wealthiest microstates. Ukrainian, meanwhile, belongs to the East Slavic branch of the Indo-European family, alongside Russian and Belarusian, and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.