Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A small-town story with an outsized legacy

Few first novels have entered public life as completely as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Published in 1960, it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year and has remained a fixture in classrooms and reading groups ever since. The story is told through the eyes of Scout Finch, a child observing her father Atticus defend a Black man falsely accused in 1930s Alabama. Lee published almost nothing else for decades, which only deepened the book’s singular place in American literature.

From dystopia to cultural shorthand

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in the mid-1980s, drawing on historical and religious sources rather than pure invention. The novel imagines a near-future theocracy in which women are stripped of financial and bodily autonomy. Its influence has gone far beyond literature: the red cloaks and white bonnets from the 2017 television adaptation became a recurring visual symbol in real-world protests around bodily rights.

The engineer who imagined a programmable machine

Charles Babbage never completed his Analytical Engine, but the design contained the core ideas of a general-purpose computer: a store, a mill for calculation, and the ability to be controlled by punched cards. He worked on the concept in the 1830s, roughly a century before electronic computing became feasible. Ada Lovelace, who wrote about the machine, is often credited with articulating the first algorithm intended for such a device.

A planet knocked sideways

Uranus stands out in the solar system because its axis of rotation is tilted so far that it effectively rolls around the Sun on its side. The tilt is usually attributed to one or more massive collisions early in the planet’s history. As a result, its poles receive long periods of sunlight followed by equally long periods of darkness across its 84-year orbit.