Trivia Masterclass 11

Geography; Horror Films; Number 2s

Jan 10, 2026

It’s a new year, and we are back in business! I know better by now than to make long-term projections, but I can confidently promise that there is a lot more to come this year, both in these free Trivia Masterclasses and in the new Quiz Everests for paid subscribers. I hope you enjoy this one, and have a great weekend!

Round 1 — Warm-Up

[PICTURE] Inspired by the 8-bit visuals of classic arcade games, the French street artist Invader is best known for works in what genre? This genre, more associated with the ancient world, involves assembling small glass or ceramic fragments into pictorial or geometric designs.
The football team Juventus are based in which Italian city, also home to the Agnelli dynasty of automobile tycoons who have been the club’s majority owners since 1923?
What engineering process, generally performed with a namesake “iron”, involves connecting two metal components using a filler metal, which is melted and then allowed to cool to create a secure joint?
Derived from the Inuit language, where it can refer to any dwelling, what word most familiarly describes dome-shaped temporary shelters built by inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic using blocks of compacted snow?
First appearing on the soundtrack of the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, in which this artist played the title role, the song Into the Groove gave which singer her first number 1 single in the UK?
The logo of what world-famous brand of white rum is inspired by the bat colonies who lived in the rafters of its first distillery in Santiago de Cuba? This company also produces a popular alcopop called [BLANK] Breezer.
Alfred Lord Tennyson’s narrative poem The Charge of the Light Brigade was inspired by a 1854 British military disaster during which war?
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty both shot to stardom after playing the titular bank-robbing duo in what 1967 film, which ends with the couple’s shockingly graphic deaths in a hail of machine-gun fire?
A punning collective nickname given to the zoologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas referenced their extensive work with members of what order of mammals, respectively chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans? As well as those apes, this order also includes monkeys, lemurs, and humans.
Nicknamed the “Queen of Latin”, Shirley Ballas replaced Len Goodman in 2017 as the head judge on what long-running BBC competition show?
In Norse mythology, the chariot of the goddess Freya is pulled by two of what animals, common as pets? These animals were also revered in ancient Egypt, where they were associated with the goddess Bastet.
Suggesting a supernatural entity, what verb in contemporary slang describes the action of ending a relationship by abruptly ceasing all communication and contact with the other person without explanation?
Which European capital city stands on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, at the mouth of the River Tagus?
With a title taken from Shakespeare’s Othello, the Pomp and Circumstance marches are among the most recognisable pieces by what British composer?
British swimmer Adam Peaty, who won consecutive Olympic golds in 2016 and 2020, was one of the most dominant competitors of all time in what stroke? This is the slowest of the four official styles of competitive swimming, and the most popular among recreational swimmers.
Which American actress holds the record as the most Oscar-nominated performer in history, with the first of her 21 nominations coming for 1978’s The Deer Hunter and her most recent for 2017’s The Post?
John Tyler and Millard Fillmore were among the four mid-19th-century US Presidents who represented what party? A British party with this name was the main rival of the Tories from the 1680s until the 1850s, although like its American namesake it is no longer politically active.
The debut album by indie rock band English Teacher which won the Mercury Prize in 2024 was titled This Could Be …what US state? Sharleen Spiteri is the lead singer of a Scottish rock band named after this state.
Cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, who created Kimba the White Lion and Astro Boy in the 1950s, is often dubbed “the Father of” what Japanese art form? This word is generally used for all comic strips and graphic novels produced in Japan, and it should not be confused with the film genre of anime, which Tezuka also pioneered.
What alliterative French term, meaning “deadly woman”, refers to a literary archetype of a seductive female character who manipulates her (usually) male admirers for her own enigmatic ends?

Round 1 — ANSWERS

Mosaic
Turin
Soldering
Igloo
Madonna
Bacardi
Crimean War
Bonnie and Clyde
Primates (the trio were nicknamed “the Tri-Mates”)
Strictly Come Dancing
Cats
Ghosting
Lisbon
Edward Elgar
Breaststroke
Meryl Streep
Whigs
Texas
Manga
Femme fatale

Round 2 — The Fundamentals: Geography

What is the Japanese name of the high-speed national rail network known to English-speakers as the “bullet train”?
Behind the five Great Lakes, what alpine lake on the California-Nevada border is the sixth largest lake by volume in the USA? It is a major tourist destination thanks in part to its many nearby ski resorts, including Squaw Valley, the host of the 1960 Winter Olympics.
The city of Patras, where Saint Andrew is said to have been martyred, is the most populous city on what large peninsula of southern Greece, connected to the rest of the country’s mainland by the narrow Isthmus of Corinth? Formerly known as Morea, its usual name refers to the son of Tantalus in Greek mythology.
[PICTURE] Which African country’s flag features three horizontal stripes of blue, white, and green with a central depiction of a traditional straw hat called a mokorotlo?
Meaning “Gate of Grief” in Arabic, what strait flows between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and forms the southernmost point of the Red Sea?
Which major language of South-East Asia uses an alphabet devised by 17th-century French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes? Unlike most Asian languages, this alphabet is based on the Roman script, with diacritic marks representing sound variations not found in European languages.
Despite no European country being a member of OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), its headquarters is located in what European capital city? This city is also home to several subsidiary bodies of the UN as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency.
A distinctive geological feature of southern England’s Jurassic Coast, what narrow “barrier beach” runs for eighteen miles in an almost completely straight line, parallel with the Dorset coastline, linking the Isle of Portland with the mainland? It provides the titular setting of a 2007 novel.
Which of Australia’s eight state and territory capitals has had to be almost completely rebuilt on four separate occasions, following two cyclones in 1897 and 1937, a devastating Japanese air raid in 1942, and most recently Cyclone Tracy in 1974?
What principal river of Burma (or Myanmar) runs from north to south directly through the centre of the country, with its drainage basin covering well over half of Burma’s land area? The “road to Mandalay” in Rudyard Kipling’s famous colonial poem likely refers to this river, rather than to an overland route.
After the Pashtun, what Persian-speaking people form the second-largest ethnic group of Afghanistan, where they are predominant in many of the major cities including Kabul and Herat? Afghanistan is home to more people of this ethnicity than any other country, including the neighbouring country which is named after them.
With a profile often compared to the back of a spoon or a half-buried egg, what Irish-derived word refers to elongated hills which are believed to have formed underneath glacial ice sheets, with their orientation reflecting the direction of the ice-flow?
What major seaport, nicknamed “the jewel of the Pacific”, is the second-most populous city in Chile after the capital Santiago, having been the country’s dominant metropolis until the Panama Canal reduced its importance as a stopping point for ships rounding Cape Horn? Another fun fact: the oldest continuously-circulating Spanish-language newspaper, El Mercurio, was founded in this city in 1827.
Running between the northern tip of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula and the south-eastern and south-western coasts of Norway and Sweden respectively, what strait links the North Sea with the bounded Kattegat sea area? It should not be confused with the much narrower Øresund strait, which links the Kattegat to the Baltic.
Although Dunfermline is the largest settlement and (since 2022) the only city in Fife, which town serves as its administrative centre? Created soon after World War II as one of Scotland’s earliest New Towns, it is unusual among large British towns in that its effective town centre is an indoor retail complex.
Pago Pago is the capital of what unincorporated Pacific Ocean territory of the USA, the only permanently-inhabited US territory where US citizenship is not legally granted at birth? Internationally, it is perhaps best known as a global hub of the canned tuna industry.
The medieval rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, the walled city of Harar (sometimes called the fourth holiest city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem), and the valley of the Awash river where the early hominid skeleton ‘Lucy’ was discovered in 1974, are among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of what African country?
Administered by France since 1878, what Caribbean island was formerly the centre of the Swedish West Indies, as reflected in the name of its capital city Gustavia? Now a luxury tourist hotspot, holiday-makers often refer to the island by a shortened form of its name, which originally derived from that of Christopher Columbus’s younger brother.
What very large marshy region in Provence, the largest wetland area in Western Europe, is formed by the delta of the River Rhône, downstream from the city of Arles where it branches in two? This region contains several briny lagoons known as étangs, and is home to a namesake breed of semi-feral horses.
The busiest passenger air route in the world, with around 150 flights every day, connects the city of Seoul with which largest island of South Korea, which is also home to the country’s highest mountain, Hallasan?

Round 2 — ANSWERS

Shinkansen
Lake Tahoe
Peleponnese (after Pelops, the son whom Tantalus bafflingly decided to cut into pieces and serve to the gods in a stew to test their divine omniscience)
Lesotho
Bab-el-Mandeb
Vietnamese
Vienna
Chesil Beach (as in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach)
Darwin (capital of Northern Territory)
Irrawaddy
Tajiks
Drumlin
Valparaíso
Skagerrak
Glenrothes
American Samoa
Ethiopia
Saint Barthélemy (or St Barts)
Camargue
Jeju

Round 3 — A Deeper Dive: Horror Films

Which American actor played ruthlessly ambitious journalist Gail Weathers in 1996’s Scream, reprising the role in (so far) five sequels? In 1999 she married one of her franchise co-stars, although they are now divorced.
The horror films The Birds and Don’t Look Now were both based on short stories by what British author, whose best-known novel, a romantic thriller with horror overtones, also spawned a classic film adaptation?
The track East Hastings by Canadian post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor soundtracks the most famous scene from what 2000s post-apocalyptic horror movie, accompanying the protagonist as he wanders the eerily deserted streets of central London?
Characterised by mystery narratives, psychological themes, and titillating visual excess, Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace and Dario Argento’s Deep Red are landmark examples of what Italian horror genre of the 1960s and ’70s? The genre’s name references a colour which is neither black nor red.
Set to focus on an artificially intelligent love-making doll rather than the child’s toy featured in the original, SOULM8TE is a planned upcoming spin-off from what horror film franchise, whose first film was released in 2023 and also featured a number in its title?
Which American actor had one of her first major film roles as the mother of possessed child Regan (played by Linda Blair) in 1973’s The Exorcist? She won a Best Actress Oscar the following year as the title character in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Having made her debut with the 2016 coming-of-age cannibalism drama Raw, which French body-horror auteur became only the second female recipient of the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or award with 2021’s Titane?
One of the most incredible practical effects in horror movie history is a scene in what 1981 David Cronenberg film, where one of the title telekinetic human-weapons demonstrates their powers by making a rival’s head explode?
Which major Hollywood studio became synonymous with “monster pictures” in the 1930s and ’40s, including Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and Lon Chaney Jr’s The Wolf Man? For the last decade, the studio has repeatedly aired plans (not yet realised) for a Marvel-style cinematic universe bringing together all their classic monsters.
[PICTURE] In Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror movie Get Out, what name is given to the void-like purgatory in which victims of the Armitage family have their consciousnesses trapped by hypnosis, losing agency over their bodies? This phrase entered the cultural lexicon after the film’s release, as a resonant symbol for structural racism in contemporary America.
The first colour 3-D film released by a major American studio was what 1953 horror film, in which Vincent Price played the curator of the titular sculpture gallery who replenishes his stock of exhibits after a fire by using the corpses of his murder victims?
One of the most disturbing depictions of psychopathy in film history, what was the English title of the 1988 Dutch thriller Spoorloos, which its director re-made for Hollywood in 1993 to far less critical acclaim than the original? In the words of Mark Kermode, “the original was about the banality of evil, but the remake became about the evil of banality”.
Employing a seriously unnerving stop-motion aesthetic based on paint, papier-maché, and masking tape, the 2018 animated horror film The Wolf House was produced in what country of the Americas? The film’s plot, following a traumatised girl’s escape from an indoctrination camp, was inspired by a dark chapter of this country’s recent history.
What 1997 sci-fi horror movie by director Paul W. S. Anderson (not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson) stars Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill as members of a rescue crew sent to salvage the titular spacecraft, which mysteriously reappears after vanishing into another dimension?
One of the most important works of Black horror cinema, which 1973 cult classic starred Marlene Clark and Duane Jones as the eponymous pair of vampiric lovers? Spike Lee remade the film in 2014 with the new title Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.
Having made his name with much more happy-go-lucky roles in The Princess Bride and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which English actor played the lead role in 2004’s Saw, which memorably sees his character amputating his own foot to escape from an ankle shackle?
Described as a cross between John Wayne’s The Searchers and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, what 2015 debut film by director S. Craig Zahler starred Kurt Russell as a small-town sheriff in the 1890s who leads a small posse against a clan of cannibalistic Troglodytes?
Although Godzilla is by far the most famous “kaiju” monster created by Japan’s Toho studio, the second most famous is probably what character introduced in 1961? This giant female character’s design was inspired by silkworms, in both their larval and flying forms, and she has generally been portrayed much more heroically than other kaijus.
The tiny indie production company who scored a massive hit with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project named themselves after what 1922 silent horror film by Danish director Benjamin Christensen? Framed as a documentary on the history of witchcraft, interspersed with scenes of demonic orgies and witch trials, it was re-released in the USA in the 1960s with added narration by William S. Burroughs.
What title is shared by a 1942 horror film that included cinema’s first ever “jump-scare” (sometimes called “the Lewton bus” in reference to producer Val Lewton), and a 1982 remake of that film whose theme song was composed by Giorgio Moroder and performed by David Bowie?

Round 3 — ANSWERS

Courtney Cox (married her co-star David Arquette)
Daphne du Maurier
28 Days Later
Giallo (in reference to the yellow dust-jackets of a popular series of mystery novels by Italian publisher Mondadori)
M3GAN
Ellen Burstyn
Julia Ducournau
Scanners (later that year, the artist behind this effect, Chris Walas, created the iconic face-melting moment at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Universal Pictures
The Sunken Place
House of Wax
The Vanishing
Chile (inspired by the Colonia Dignidad abuses)
Event Horizon (huge tangent: Paul Thomas Anderson has yet to direct a horror movie but he does have a fun horror connection through his father, Ernie Anderson, who hosted the late-night Shock Theatre programme on a Cleveland TV channel in the mid-1960s in the persona of “Ghoulardi”, which is now the name of PTA’s production company)
Ganja & Hess
Cary Elwes
Bone Tomahawk
Mothra
Häxan
Cat People

Round 4 — Themes and Trends: Number 2s

The eponymous opening track on The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ends by introducing singer Billy Shears (the fictional alter ego of Ringo Starr) who performs what second track on the album? Appropriately for Ringo, the song begins “what would you think if I sang out of tune?”
Sweden’s island of Gotland is the largest island in the Baltic Sea by area; the second-largest, Saaremaa, is part of the territory of what country?
Country singer Blake Shelton is probably best known outside America as the second husband of what pop star? The couple started dating in 2015 after the breakdowns of their previous marriages to musicians Miranda Lambert and Gavin Rossdale respectively.
Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk in 1965 during the second mission in what Soviet space programme? This was itself the Soviet Union’s second human spaceflight project, after the Vostok programme which sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit.
Following two hapless criminals attempting to silently burgle a luxury mansion, the dialogue-free slapstick episode A Quiet Night In was the second episode in what BBC comedy series? Later episodes of this show, which concluded in 2024, included The Twelve Days of Christine and Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room.
The Cree are the most populous of the indigenous First Nations of Canada, closely followed by what other people? Dreamcatchers first originated among this people, and their mythology formed the basis for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha.
After Wynton Marsalis’s Blood on the Fields in 1997, the second jazz album to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music was what veteran saxophonist’s Sound Grammar in 2007? This man pioneered free jazz in the late 1950s with albums including Something Else!!!! and The Shape of Jazz to Come.
After A Study in Scarlet, what was the second of Arthur Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels? This novel begins by depicting Holmes injecting himself with cocaine, and a major plot point concerns the looting of a fictional princely treasure during the 1857 Indian Rebellion.
Host nation Canada failed to win any gold medals at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, but their two silvers, both in individual figure skating, both came in the midst of huge media hype. While Elizabeth Manley’s silver threw a curveball into the anticipated “Battle of the Carmens” between Katarina Witt and Debi Thomas, what name did the press give to the parallel “Battle” in the men’s event, in reference to the shared forename of the gold and silver medallists?
Who succeeded Nelson Mandela as the second post-apartheid President of South Africa, holding office from 1999 to 2008? He was widely condemned for his support of HIV/AIDS denialism throughout his presidency, with his Health Minister infamously promoting beetroot juice rather than anti-retroviral medicines as a treatment for AIDS patients.
Subtitled Among Thieves, the 2009 second instalment of what video game series was considered vastly superior to its predecessor, and is still often named among the best action-adventure games of all time? Reintroducing the treasure-hunter protagonist Nathan Drake, the sequel follows his search for the lost Himalayan city of Shambhala.
If you play a lot of quizzes, you may well know that technetium is the lightest chemical element with no stable isotopes (i.e. all its forms are radioactive). What lanthanide element, with the atomic number 61, is the second-lightest element for which this is the case, and the only other example below bismuth on the periodic table?
Only four months into her professional career, which began more or less out of nowhere after she appeared in an Instagram photo from Howard University’s homecoming week, which Cairo-born American model became only the second black woman to open a Prada show in 2018, and the first since Naomi Campbell twenty years earlier? She recently fronted a hit campaign for Mugler’s Alien Hypersense perfume, and she was named Model of the Year at the 2025 Fashion Awards.
One of the leading figures of the Second Viennese School, which composer’s second opera Lulu was left unfinished at his death? The opera’s final act sees the title character being murdered by Jack the Ripper.
While he may only be the third most prominent Philip II in the quiz history curriculum (after the Spanish king who sent the Armada and the king of Macedon who fathered Alexander the Great), Philip II of France, aka Philip Augustus (1180-1223), could be argued to have had the most successful reign of any French monarch. This included his crushing victory over a coalition of rivals, including England’s King John, at what battle of 1214, which resulted in John losing almost all his continental realms and much of his remaining bargaining power with his English barons (setting the context for the following year’s Magna Carta)?
Which Chelsea goalkeeper became the second Senegalese footballer to win the Champions League in 2021, two years after Sadio Mané’s victory with Liverpool? He was also the first African goalkeeper to lift the trophy since Liverpool’s Bruce Grobbelaar in 1984.
In the canonical list of Ancient Greece’s Nine Lyric Poets, the first and earliest name is the largely forgotten Alcman of Sparta. Which much more famous poet of the Ode to Aphrodite is the second name on the list, just marginally older than Alcaeus who like this poet lived in the city of Mytilene?
Ten-year-old Tatum O’Neal’s supporting performance in 1973’s Paper Moon made her the youngest Oscar-winner in history. Second on this list is what 1993 Best Supporting Actress recipient, whose adult roles included Rogue in the X-Men franchise and protagonist Sookie Stackhouse in HBO vampire drama True Blood?
[PICTURE] The second winner of the Pritzker Prize, after Philip Johnson in 1979, which architect’s iconic designs in his native Mexico City include the Satélite Towers and, perhaps most famously, his own personal home?
Introduced in 1999 to supplement the original draw, now known as Lotto, what is the second-longest running draw operated by the UK’s National Lottery? It shares its name with a James Bond film whose main villain is SPECTRE No. 2, Emilio Largo.

Round 4 — ANSWERS

With a Little Help from My Friends
Estonia
Gwen Stefani
Voskhod
Inside No. 9
Ojibwe (or Chippewa)
Ornette Coleman
The Sign of the Four
Battle of the Brians (Canada’s Brian Orser narrowly lost out to the USA’s Brian Boitano)
Thabo Mbeki
Uncharted
Promethium
Anok Yai
Alban Berg
Battle of Bouvines
Édouard Mendy
Sappho (Mytilene is the capital of the island of Lesbos)
Anna Paquin (won her Oscar aged eleven for her debut rule in The Piano)
Luis Barragán
Thunderball

Round 5 — No Pain, No Gain

One of the UK’s best ever Eurovision entries, although a nervous performance on the night yielded a disappointing seventh place, what duo performed One Step Further at the 1982 contest in Harrogate, taking the song to number 2 in the UK charts a week later?
[PICTURE] One of my early-teen favourites because he had by far the best facial hair in my history encyclopaedia, what Russian politician served as Prime Minister from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, and was the last Tsarist statesman to pursue major social and economic reforms within a monarchist framework? The class of land-owning peasants known as “kulaks” (notoriously attacked by Stalin’s collectivisation policies) emerged largely as a result of this man’s agricultural reforms.
The latest series from the Mike Judge adult-animation stable behind Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, what 2025 series on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block concerns two friends who discover a mushroom with miraculous healing powers, and then run into a big pharma conspiracy aimed at suppressing its existence?
Still often assigned to medical students to illustrate the importance of cross-cultural competence, Anne Fadiman’s 1997 non-fiction book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down described a clash between the scientific beliefs of American doctors and the shamanistic beliefs of the parents of an epileptic child of what South-East Asian ethnicity? Members of this ethnicity’s large American diaspora also feature prominently in the Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino.
The longest recorded non-stop migration by a bird was an eleven-day continuous flight from Alaska to Tasmania by a member of the bar-tailed species of what long-billed wading bird? These birds look very similar to curlews, except for the fact that while curlews have downward-curving bills, their bills are either straight or curve slightly upwards.
A former solicitor and 2013 Masterchef contestant, what British food writer is known for her hugely popular Roasting Tin series of cookbooks, offering flavourful and nutritious recipes that can be prepared with minimal equipment, time, or technical proficiency?
One of the most famous unseen characters in the works of Shakespeare, much discussed by post-colonialist critics, what name is given in The Tempest to the powerful witch and mother of Caliban, who ruled the play’s central island before the arrival of Prospero?
While the most prominent video games built for the Nintendo Wii were fairly whimsical and family-friendly, what 2006 launch title for the console, published by Ubisoft, attempted to harness its motion-tracking technology for the first-person shooter genre? It received mixed reviews due to significant controlling glitches, although its Wild West-themed 2009 sequel was more favourably received.
Reportedly consisting of seven nested citadels each painted a different colour, what ancient Iranian city served as the capital of the Median empire until its capture by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC, after which it became a summer residence for the Achaemenid and Parthian emperors?
Also called ceòl mòr (or “great music”) to distinguish it from popular dance tunes known as ceòl beag (“little music”), what Scottish Gaelic word refers to a genre of bagpipe composition whose formal structure makes it somewhat akin to classical music? Works in this genre feature a melodic theme or ùrlar extended across increasingly elaborate variations, with movements called the leumluath, taorluath, and crùnluath.
What English actor got her start as Daisy, one of the teenage spy heroes of beloved CBBC show M.I. High, before making her acclaimed feature film debut in 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl? She will soon appear as Petunia Dursley in HBO’s TV adaptation of the Harry Potter series.
The leading British exponent of the (primarily French) Symbolist movement, which Victorian artist’s 1886 painting Hope depicts a blinded female figure sitting on a desolate globe, playing a harp with only one string? A 1990 sermon by Jeremiah Wright themed around this iconic image famously fired the imagination of a young Barack Obama, who used “Hope” as his 2008 electoral slogan.
Before his time at Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain made him one of the star goalkeepers in world football, Keylor Navas began his senior career with what club in his native Costa Rica, whom he helped to their biggest ever international success with third place in the 2005 FIFA Club World Cup? An IFFHS report named this club as North/Central America’s most statistically successful team of the 20th century.
Known for its circular structure (channelling Finnegan’s Wake with its first line being the end of a sentence that begins in its last line), what 1975 novel is the best-known work by US sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany? The story is set in the fictional Rust Belt city of Bellona, which for unexplained reasons has become unmoored from the outside world, experiencing bizarre astronomical events and dilations of time and logic.
Pioneered in the 1970s by Cher’s stylist Way Bandy, what is the name of the make-up technique that applies blush to the cheekbones to create a softly sculpted effect, as an alternative to the matte or brown bronzers more traditionally used in contouring?
Named after a Swiss-American physicist who won the 1952 Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear magnetic induction, what three-dimensional geometric construct is used to visualise the possible superposition states of a two-level quantum system, and is particularly valuable in quantum computing for representing qubits (binary units of quantum information)?
One of the great R&B masterpieces of the ’90s, and still a touchstone for mainstream pop stars reinventing themselves with introspective concept albums, what 1997 album by Janet Jackson featured house anthem Together Again, inspired by a friend’s recent death from AIDS, as well as the Joni Mitchell-sampling single Got ‘til It’s Gone? The album’s title reflected its thematic focus on emotional, societal, and sexual boundaries.
What American sociologist developed the extremely influential “world-systems” theory of global history in the 1970s, arguing that the primary units of geopolitics are not individual nation states but the transnational division of labour itself which separates the world into “core” and “peripheral” zones?
Reaching a career high of world no. 4 in 2019, what clay court specialist overtook Betty Stove to become the highest-ranked Dutch female player in tennis history (not counting wheelchair tennis, which multiple Dutch players have dominated)? While she had a pattern of underperforming at Grand Slams, she won ten WTA singles titles including the 2019 Madrid Open where she won all six matches in straight sets.
Performed by Bob Hope in the 1948 comedy western The Paleface, what song gave composer/lyricist duo Ray Evans and Jay Livingston their first Academy Award for Best Original Song, a success they later repeated with Mona Lisa and Que Sera Sera? While probably the least familiar of those three Oscar-winners, it has an immortal place in the hearts of Frasier fans for the episode where Frasier attempts to perform it on a live PBS telethon but forgets almost all the lyrics.

Round 5 — ANSWERS

Bardo
Pyotr Stolypin
Common Side Effects
Hmong (or Hmong Americans)
Godwit
Rukmini Iyer
Sycorax
Red Steel
Ecbatana
Pibroch (or piobaireachd)
Bel Powley
G. F. Watts
Saprissa
Dhalgren
Draping
Bloch sphere
The Velvet Rope
Immanuel Wallerstein
Kiki Bertens
Buttons and Bows

And that’s your lot. Hope you had fun. Feel free to share your best gets and most annoying misses in the comments. Paid subscribers can expect a Quiz Everest next weekend, and I’ll see all of you with a new Masterclass in a fortnight’s time. For now I’ll leave you with the trailer for Chilean horror masterpiece ‘The Wolf House’ — fair warning, there’s no blood and guts in the video, but if you’re prone to nightmares, maybe just search for Frasier’s ‘Buttons and Bows’ performance instead!