Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The unlikely publishing history of a modern classic

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird arrived in 1960 and quickly became a staple of American classrooms. Less often remembered is that Lee worked for years on the manuscript, and that the novel grew out of short stories she had been encouraged to develop. Its portrait of small-town Alabama life, seen through the eyes of a child, gave mid-century American fiction one of its most enduring voices.

A playwright between comedy and elegy

Anton Chekhov did not call The Cherry Orchard a tragedy. He insisted it was a comedy, even as its characters face the loss of a beloved estate. The play, first performed in 1904, marked the end of his career and is often seen as a bridge between nineteenth-century Russian realism and the more symbolic theatre that followed. Its tone remains deliberately hard to pin down.

A tiny state with a very old parliament

Andorra sits high in the Pyrenees between France and Spain, and its political setup is unusual: it is a co-principality, with two heads of state, one of them the President of France. Tourism and duty-free shopping dominate its modern economy, but the country’s roots reach back centuries, and it has long maintained a distinct identity despite being surrounded by much larger neighbors.

Venus and the shape of an orbit

Venus has the most circular orbit of all the planets in our solar system. Its path around the Sun is closer to a perfect circle than Earth’s, which means its distance from the Sun varies less over the course of a year. That near-circular orbit is just one of several traits that make Venus an unusual neighbor, alongside its slow rotation and thick, heat-trapping atmosphere.