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Culture quiz: from Monty Python to Lady Gaga's meat dress

Tests your arts knowledge with these questions from the Observer’s critics

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, what question does Michael Palin’s character, Sir Galahad the Pure, get wrong?  

What is your name?

What is your favourite colour?

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

What does 21-time Oscar-nominated actor Meryl Streep do to keep grounded?

Her own tax returns

Her own gardening

Her own ironing

Pulp members Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Phil Selway all appear in which film?

They were four of the Weird Sisters in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

They play Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

They play Glastonbury festival punters in Bridget Jones’s Baby

What nationality was Arnold Böcklin?

German

Swiss

Austrian

Which of the following is not a Swedish painter?

August Strindberg

Hilma af Klint

Anders Zorn

Puccini is famous for his tragic heroines but one of the following does not die. Which?

Madama Butterfly

Tosca

Turandot

Which 19th-century composer-performer entertained concert audiences with their farmyard impressions?

Niccolò Paganini

Clara Schumann

Frédéric Chopin

In HBO’s hit comedy show Silicon Valley, Jìan-Yáng’s “See Food” artificial intelligence app can only successfully identify which type of food?

Hot dogs

Ice-cream

Nachos

The revolutionary anthem Ciao Bella, recorded by such disparate artistes as Yves Montand, the Red Army Choir and Sandie Shaw, is one of the recurring tropes, along with Dali masks and red jumpsuits, of the global Netflix hit Money Heist. Whose privations was it originally written to lament?

Soldiers occupying Italian Somalia in 1935 and facing the Abyssinian Crisis (in what is now Ethiopia)

Construction workers in Sicily in the early 1950s, battling both an emergent mafia and paltry government pensions

The mondina women in the paddy fields of north Italy

Which Norwegian archipelago, also home to the infamous Moskstraumen (or maelstrom) whirlpool system, is the chill setting for the series Twin, currently airing on BBC Four?

Lofoten

Svalbard/Spitzbergen

Jan Mayen

Which writer took her pen name from an Ibsen play?

Siri Hustvedt

Nora Ephron

Rebecca West

Which musical contains the number Out of the Darkness?

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie

Dear Evan Hansen

The Boy in the Dress

Whose video for Cloudbusting featured Donald Sutherland?

Björk

Neneh Cherry

Kate Bush

Michael Owuo Jr is the real name of which rapper?

Drake

Snoop Dogg

Stormzy

How many slow, sad ballads are there on Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia?

1

0

3

In September it will be 10 years since Lady Gaga wore her infamous meat dress to the MTV Video Music awards. What happened to it?

It was fed to the hyenas at Central Park Zoo

It was dumped at the Pentagon in protest at the US military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality

It was preserved by a taxidermist and displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Which of these architects has not featured in The Simpsons?

Rem Koolhaas

Frank Gehry

Zaha Hadid

What came first?

Art deco

Art nouveau

New brutalism

18 and above.

Certified genius

17 and above.

Brain box

16 and above.

Culture vulture

15 and above.

Wow!

14 and above.

Hot to trot

13 and above.

Well done you!

12 and above.

Very respectable

11 and above.

Pretty good

10 and above.

Not bad

9 and above.

Average

8 and above.

Could do better

7 and above.

Not so hot

6 and above.

Poor

5 and above.

Bird brain

4 and above.

Good grief

3 and above.

Shocking

2 and above.

Not pretty

0 and above.

Embarrassing

1 and above.

Woeful

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