Which city did Margaret Atwood describe as ‘New York without the garbage and muggings’? Which writer called one London area ‘ungentrified, ungentrifiable’? Pit your wits against our quiz
“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning." Which city was Ernest Hemingway describing?
Bristol
Vancouver
Singapore
Paris
"I love your criminal alleyways / Your dagger-like moon upon the hills,” wrote the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Which city was he describing?
Valparaíso
Bogotá
Santiago
Medellín
On clear days, in which city can you see "beyond some low houses and walls of tufa and patches of thick vegetation, a blue mountain with one low peak and one a little higher", according to a famous pseudonymous novelist?
Rome
Naples
Athens
Palermo
In a memoir, the winner of the 2006 Nobel prize in literature described his home town as follows: "For the more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to the same heights of wealth, power and culture." Name the city.
Damascus
Istanbul
Athens
Rome
Which city is the subject of this quote from a famous US playwright? "In this part of [town] you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played …"
San Francisco
New Orleans
New York City
Atlanta
"Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never came here. Here bust is permanent …" Which celebrated contemporary author described an area of London in those words?
Andrea Levy
Hanif Kureishi
Zadie Smith
Martin Amis
“Lost and beaten and full of emptiness”, “a neon-lighted slum” and a place “with no more personality than a paper cup”. But which town is this famous private eye – who admits he'll “take the big, sordid, dirty, crooked city” every time – talking about?
Los Angeles
Chicago
New York
Boston
Which North American city does Margaret Atwood describe as "New York without the garbage and muggings"?
Chicago
Toronto
Vancouver
Seattle
Which city was described by Charles Dickens as a place where "the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh" and by George Orwell "as a gathering-place for eccentric people, people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent"?
London
Madrid
Barcelona
Paris
"The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumping out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game centre crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar ... dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs ..." Which city is full of late-night energy?
Las Vegas
New York City
Tokyo
Berlin
Which war-torn city did Khaled Hosseini describe as follows in his 2013 bestseller? "... the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it's like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. [The city's] vivid, arresting details – the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window."
Aleppo
Mosul
Gaza
Kabul
Which city – built to "cut a window into Europe", according to Aleksandr Pushkin – did a seminal novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky describe as "a city of half-crazy people ... there are few places where you'll find so many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of a man"?
Moscow
St Petersburg
Vienna
Kiev
Where are the characters of an Irvine Welsh novel when they "go fir a pish in the auld Central Station at the Fit ay the Walk, now a barren, desolate hangar, which is soon tae be demolished and replaced by a supermarket and swimming centre"?
Glasgow
Leith
Aberdeen
Dundee
Which city is this poem about? "We make brilliant music. We make brilliant bands / We make goals that make souls leap from seats in the stands / And we make things from steel and we make things from cotton / And we make people laugh, take the mick summat rotten."
Manchester
Newcastle
Liverpool
Sheffield
13 and above.
Excellent
14 and above.
Excellent!
12 and above.
Well done
11 and above.
Well done
10 and above.
Well done
9 and above.
Well done
8 and above.
OK
7 and above.
OK
6 and above.
Not great
5 and above.
Poor
4 and above.
Poor
3 and above.
Hmmm
2 and above.
Hmmm
1 and above.
Oh dear
0 and above.
Oh dear
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