Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A novel that took London's slums seriously

Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist in 1838, first as a serial in Bentley's Miscellany before it appeared as a book. It was one of the earliest English novels to put a child protagonist at its centre and to portray the workhouse system and London's criminal underworld without romanticising them. Dickens knew the territory: his own family had spent time in a debtors' prison when he was a boy.

The long shadow of Captain Cook

Captain James Cook was killed in Hawaii in 1779, during his third Pacific voyage. He had already mapped New Zealand and Australia's eastern coast and crossed the Antarctic Circle. His death at Kealakekua Bay came amid rising tensions with Hawaiian islanders - a reminder that the era of exploration was also an era of encounter, misunderstanding and violence.

One river, many names

The Mississippi takes its name from the Ojibwe or Algonquian term often translated as "great river" or "father of waters", reflecting its scale and importance to Indigenous peoples long before European exploration. It drains all or part of more than 30 US states, and its shifting course has shaped trade, agriculture and settlement across the continent.

A war that redrew the map

World War II ran from 1939 to 1945, beginning with Germany's invasion of Poland and ending with surrender in Europe and the Pacific. It was the deadliest conflict in history, and its aftermath produced the United Nations, the Cold War divide and a wave of decolonisation. Few events have left a deeper mark on the modern world.

An escaped convict who became a symbol

Jean Valjean, the central figure of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, is a former prisoner whose struggle for redemption drives the novel. Published in 1862, the book also weaves in the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, giving its personal drama a political backdrop that still resonates in stage and screen adaptations.