1. From which song are the following lyrics taken?
‘I heard a siren from the docks / Saw a train set the night on fire / I smelled the spring on the smoky wind’
[Dirty Old Town by Ewan MacColl. The town is Salford.]
2. Which was the first language in which a translation of Marx’s Capital was published?
[Russian, in 1872, which I found rather surprising]
3. In Liverpool, what was known as the dockers’ umbrella?
[The Liverpool Overhead Railway, which ran above the docks and Pier Head. It closed in 1956.]
4. Who described British people to his mistress as follows: ‘people who carry an umbrella can never … understand the moral significance of war, because they cannot love that supreme, inexorable violence which is the chief motor force of world history’?
[Mussolini]
5. In the American South, what was the underground railroad?
[A secret network of escape routes for slaves. In this connection I recommend Colson Whitehead’s alternate history novel The Underground Railroad]
6. The COP28 climate summit was held recently in UAE. What does ‘COP’ stand for?
[Conference of the Parties (very boring answer)]
7. What happened in Spain on 26 April 1937?
[The bombing of Guernica]
8. Why is an early australopithecine skeleton known as ‘Lucy’?
[After the skeleton was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ was played in the expedition’s camp]
9. Which city has a monument to the cholera epidemic of 1832, in which 402 people died?
[Sheffield. The monument is on a hill, the other side of the railway station from the city centre]
10. What does Bruce Springsteen’s song ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ refer to?
[A character in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. The following lines from the song echo a passage from the book: ‘Now Tom said "mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy /
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries /
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air /
Look for me mom I'll be there”’.
The Springsteen song is based on an earlier song on the same subject by Woodie Guthrie]
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