Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A capital split down the middle

Nicosia has been divided since 1974, when a buffer zone - the Green Line - was drawn across the island after the Turkish intervention that followed a Greek-backed coup. That line still runs through the old city, making Nicosia the last divided capital in Europe. Its Venetian walls, built in the sixteenth century, were designed as a perfect circle with eleven bastions; today some of those bastions sit on one side of the divide and some on the other.

The fountain that gave Rome its most photographed corner

The Trevi Fountain is technically a terminus: it marks the end point of the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct first built in 19 BC under Marcus Agrippa. The version visitors see today was designed by Nicola Salvi and completed in 1762, long after his death. Its name comes from tre vie, "three streets", which converge on the small piazza where it stands - a detail that explains why the monument feels tucked away rather than grandly framed.

Plath's novel under a pseudonym

Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar in 1963 in Britain under the pen name Victoria Lucas, partly to protect the people who had inspired its characters. The novel follows Esther Greenwood, a student who wins a magazine internship in New York and gradually unravels. It appeared only weeks before Plath's death, and it was not published in the United States under her own name until 1971.

The fall of a thousand-year capital

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman forces of Mehmed II in 1453, after a siege of roughly two months. The city had been the capital of the Byzantine Empire for over a thousand years, and its fall is often treated as the conventional dividing line between the medieval and early modern periods. Mehmed made the city his own capital, and it remained the seat of the Ottoman Empire until the twentieth century.

Why an old river still matters

The River Thames flows through just one country, but it passes through more than eighty miles of Greater London and has shaped the city's trade, boundaries and literature for centuries. Its tidal stretch means the water level can rise and fall dramatically, which is why the Thames Barrier was built downstream to protect London from storm surges.