115 questions
Each test holds the same questions every time, so you can take them in any order.
This theme is everything the handbook counts as culture. Music, film and television, theatre, painting and sculpture, architecture, design and gardens. Almost all of it comes from the chapter on modern society, with a small group of older questions from the history chapter, Shakespeare above all.
Music. The Proms and its Last Night, then the composers the handbook names. Purcell at Westminster Abbey, Handel, Holst, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Walton and Britten. After that comes pop, from the 1960s through punk in the late 1970s to Britpop and the boy and girl bands of the 1990s, along with the big venues, the summer festivals, the Welsh Eisteddfod, the Mercury Prize and the Brit Awards.
Stage and screen. The West End and its nickname, pantomime, Gilbert and Sullivan, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the play that has run since 1952, the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, and the Olivier Awards. On film, the first public screenings, Chaplin, the directors of the 1930s, Ealing Studios, David Lean and Hitchcock, Nick Park and his Oscars, BAFTA, and the British actors who have won an Oscar. Comedy has its own thread, from court jesters through the satirical magazines to Monty Python, and the BBC has several questions of its own.
Art. Medieval religious art and what the Reformation did to it, then Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, the Pre-Raphaelites, Henry Moore, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Alongside them sit the galleries and the Turner Prize.
Buildings and made things. Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, Robert Adam, the return of gothic in the 1800s, Lutyens, and the modern architects. Then furniture, ceramics, interiors and fashion, and finally gardens, the National Trust and the Eden Project.
Most of them match a name to a thing. Which composer wrote which piece, which architect designed which building, which designer worked in which material, which city holds which gallery. If you can say what each person is famous for in one line, most of the theme answers itself.
A smaller group asks for a year, and those are the hard ones. There is no way round learning them, and they are worth a separate pass while you revise.
Two Turners. Joseph Turner was a landscape painter of the 1800s. The Turner Prize is named after him but is given for contemporary art, and the shortlisted work is shown at Tate Britain. A question about one is not a question about the other.
The national galleries. London has the National Gallery and Tate Britain. Edinburgh has the National Gallery of Scotland. Cardiff has the National Museum. The names are close enough that the city is the thing to fix in your memory.
Handel wrote for two kings. The Water Music was for George I and the Music for the Royal Fireworks was for George II. Elgar and Holst have a similar pair to keep apart, since Land of Hope and Glory comes from Elgar's march and I Vow to Thee My Country comes from the Jupiter movement of Holst's Planets.
The famous gardens go by country. Kew, Sissinghurst and Hidcote are in England, Crathes and Inveraray in Scotland, Bodnant in Wales and Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland. Four countries, and the question can ask from either end.
The designers go by material. Chippendale made furniture, Clarice Cliff worked in ceramics, Terence Conran in interiors, and Mary Quant, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood in fashion.
One answer the world has moved past. The handbook names several artists and designers as figures of the day, and some have died since it was written. Zaha Hadid died in 2016, Vivienne Westwood in 2022 and Mary Quant in 2023, and Alexander McQueen had already died in 2010 before the book appeared. None of this changes an answer, because the questions ask what field each of them worked in. The one to watch is the National Trust, where the volunteer figure the handbook gives is higher than the numbers reported now. Answer the book, and a Worth knowing note appears beside the answer in practice with the current fact.
Pick this one if the names blur into each other, which is the usual complaint about it. It is the largest single block of the modern society chapter, so the time pays back twice. It sits next to Writers, Poets and Language, which is where the sonnet and the Nobel questions live even though Shakespeare's plays are here. If the whole of modern society is the problem rather than the arts, the wider track is chapter 4.