Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

A playwright who knew how to wound

Jean Racine wrote Phèdre in 1677, drawing on Greek myth: the story of a queen consumed by a forbidden passion for her stepson. The play was premiered at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris and was immediately controversial. Racine's rivals, including the older and more established Pierre Corneille, saw the tragedy as an attack on their own style. Racine then withdrew from the theatre for over a decade, becoming royal historiographer to Louis XIV.

The Yangtze's single-country course

The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world. Unlike rivers such as the Danube or the Nile, it flows entirely within one country - China - from its source in the Tanggula Mountains on the Tibetan Plateau to its mouth near Shanghai. That makes it a rare case among the world's great rivers: a major waterway whose entire basin belongs to a single nation.

How a tunic tells a social story

The tunic was the basic garment of ancient Rome: a simple piece of cloth, usually wool, pinned and belted. What changed across social classes was not the shape but the length, the quality of the fabric and the colour. Senators wore a broad purple stripe on their tunics; equestrians wore a narrow one. Ordinary citizens wore plain undyed wool. The garment was so central to Roman identity that it survived the Republic and the Empire largely unchanged.

A war that divided a nation

The American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865, primarily over the issue of slavery and the question of whether states could leave the Union. Eleven southern states seceded after Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860. The conflict killed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers, more than any other war in American history. It ended with the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.

Van Gogh's night sky

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 while staying at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France. He painted it from memory and imagination rather than from direct observation of the scene outside his window. The village in the painting is not Saint-Rémy but a composite of several places he had seen. It is now one of the most recognised paintings in Western art.