Literature and Art are both Trivial Plus topics. Literature rounds lean on the classics most people have read or been assigned, asked about details rather than plots. Art rounds cover painters, movements and museums.
For a book club, a custom topic works better: type a single author or series and Trivial builds the round around it.
In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four", which superstate is Airstrip One part of?
Oceania
Airstrip One is what Britain has become, a province of Oceania, which is permanently at war with Eurasia or Eastasia. Ingsoc is the ruling party's ideology, not a place.
Under which pen name did Mary Ann Evans write "Middlemarch"?
George Eliot
She wanted her work judged seriously and kept apart from scandal about her private life. George Sand was a French novelist, and Currer and Acton Bell were the pen names of Charlotte and Anne Brontë.
Which novel follows Leopold Bloom through Dublin on a single day?
Ulysses
James Joyce set it on June 16, 1904, which fans now celebrate as Bloomsday. "Mrs Dalloway" is the other famous single-day novel, set in London, which makes it a sneaky distractor.
Who wrote the 1932 novel "Brave New World"?
Type the answer
Aldous Huxley
Huxley's dystopia controls people through pleasure and conditioning, where Orwell's uses fear. Orwell had been Huxley's pupil at Eton, where Huxley briefly taught French.
What is the fictional town at the centre of Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"?
Macondo
The other options are also invented literary places: Comala (Juan Rulfo), Malgudi (R. K. Narayan) and Yoknapatawpha County (William Faulkner, a big influence on García Márquez).
Which is Shakespeare's shortest play?
The Comedy of Errors
At under 1,800 lines it is less than half the length of "Hamlet", his longest. Macbeth is the shortest of the tragedies, which is why it is the usual wrong answer.
Which title did F. Scott Fitzgerald consider for the novel that became "The Great Gatsby"?
All three
Fitzgerald went through several working titles, and all three of these appear in his letters. He was still trying to change it to "Under the Red, White and Blue" shortly before publication in 1925.
In "Animal Farm", what kind of animal is Boxer?
A horse
Boxer's answer to every problem is "I will work harder". The pigs sell him to a knacker when he collapses, one of the bleakest moments in the book. Benjamin is the donkey.
In Mary Shelley's novel, what is Frankenstein's first name?
Type the answer
Victor
Frankenstein is the scientist, not the creature, which is never named. Shelley began the book at 18, during the cold, wet summer of 1816 near Lake Geneva, when Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories.
Who painted "American Gothic" (1930)?
Grant Wood
The models were Wood's sister and his dentist, and the house behind them still stands in Eldon, Iowa. The painting hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Which artist founded Cubism together with Pablo Picasso?
Georges Braque
The two worked so closely from about 1908 that some of their paintings from that period are hard to tell apart. The name grew from a remark, credited to Matisse and to the critic Louis Vauxcelles, that Braque's 1908 landscapes were made of little cubes.
In which city is the Uffizi Gallery?
Florence
The building was designed in the 1560s as offices ("uffizi") for the Medici government. It holds Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus".
What was the Venus de Milo carved from?
Parian marble
Parian marble, from the Greek island of Paros, was prized for its fine grain and slight translucence. The statue was found on the island of Milos in 1820 and is in the Louvre.
Pen names are a favourite. George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and George Orwell were all pseudonyms, and quiz writers like to list two real pen names as distractors for a third.
For art, pair each famous work with the museum that holds it. "Where would you go to see it" is a common second question.
In a room, every correct answer is worth 500 points plus a speed bonus of up to 500 more, so knowing it fast matters as much as knowing it. The full rules are on How to Play.
Every question on this page was first served in a real Trivial game, then pulled from the game's question bank, checked against the answer and rewritten with an explanation. Questions whose answer is disputed were left out. If you think one is wrong, email support@flayrlabs.com and we will fix it. The library overview explains the process in more detail.
Empires, treaties and explorers, plus the gods and monsters of five traditions.
Lines, props, villains and box-office firsts, from 1939 to now.
Bands, albums, instruments and the theory terms that trip people up.
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