IMAT Reading Skills and General Knowledge · Free notes
Literature and Philosophy: A Revision Checklist of Writers, Thinkers and the Arts
Literature and Philosophy has 21 past questions since 2011, and the ministry papers from 2023 on have asked 2 of them. Both ministry questions were about novels in English: matching characters to books and naming the author of a modernist classic. The older papers ranged much wider, into philosophers, scholars and their fields, world religions, opera, film and dance. Nearly every question pairs a name with a title, a field or a country and asks which pairing is right or wrong, so learn the tables as pairs and expect one famous name to be the odd one out.
The handout has every subtopic, worked example, formula and trap with answers shown. The formula sheet is the chapter’s formulas and traps alone, on one page.
Subtopic notes
Greek Classics and Italian Literature from Dante to Ferrante
0 PYQsThe Greek epics and tragedies that started European literature, the three great Tuscan writers of the 1300s, and the Italian classics and Nobel laureates since.
Shakespeare and the English-Language Novel
0 PYQsShakespeare's plays and where they are set, the great British and Irish novels with their famous characters, and the American classics.
European and World Literature, Movements and the Nobel Prize
0 PYQsThe French, Spanish, German and Russian classics with their characters, great works from beyond Europe, the Nobel laureates the exam likes, and the main literary movements.
Philosophy from the Presocratics to the 20th Century, and the World's Religions
0 PYQsThe central idea of each major philosopher, the founders of the human sciences, and the origins and sacred texts of the main world religions.
Painting, Music, Opera Houses, Dance and Film
0 PYQsThe art movements and their painters, the great composers and opera houses, world dance traditions, and the film directors the exam names most.
Formula & revision sheet
0 formulas · 21 reference tables · 21 gotchas across all subtopics — the exam-eve cheat-sheet
Formula & revision sheet
0 formulas · 21 reference tables · 21 gotchas across all subtopics — the exam-eve cheat-sheet
Greek Classics and Italian Literature from Dante to Ferrante
Reference tables (4)
Greek epic, tragedy and comedy7 rows
| Author | Work | What it is about |
|---|---|---|
| Homer | Iliad | The anger of Achilles in the last year of the Trojan War; the death of Hector |
| Homer | Odyssey | Odysseus' ten-year journey home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope |
| Sappho | Lyric poems | Love poetry from the island of Lesbos |
| Aeschylus | Oresteia | Trilogy: the murder of Agamemnon and the revenge of his son Orestes |
| Sophocles | Oedipus Rex; Antigone | Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother; Antigone buries her brother against the king's order |
| Euripides | Medea | Medea kills her own children to punish her unfaithful husband Jason |
| Aristophanes | The Clouds; Lysistrata | Comedies; The Clouds mocks Socrates, Lysistrata has women strike to end a war |
Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio: the three crowns of Italian literature3 rows
| Writer | Life | Main work | Key facts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dante Alighieri | Born Florence 1265; exiled 1302; died Ravenna 1321 | Divine Comedy | Journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven; written in Tuscan, not Latin |
| Petrarch | Born Arezzo 1304; died Arquà 1374 | Canzoniere | 366 poems, most for Laura; crowned poet in Rome, 1341 |
| Giovanni Boccaccio | Born 1313 (Certaldo or Florence); died Certaldo 1375 | Decameron | 100 tales told over ten days by ten young people who leave Florence to escape the plague of 1348 |
Italian classics from Machiavelli to Verga8 rows
| Writer | Work | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| Niccolò Machiavelli | The Prince (written 1513) | Florentine; how a ruler gains and keeps power |
| Ludovico Ariosto | Orlando Furioso (1516) | Chivalric epic written at the court of Ferrara |
| Torquato Tasso | Gerusalemme liberata (1581) | Epic poem of the First Crusade |
| Carlo Goldoni | The Servant of Two Masters; La locandiera | Venetian playwright who reformed Italian comedy |
| Ugo Foscolo | Dei Sepolcri; Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis | Neoclassical and Romantic poet |
| Giacomo Leopardi | Canti (L'infinito) | Poet from Recanati |
| Alessandro Manzoni | I promessi sposi (final version 1840 to 1842) | Renzo and Lucia in Lombardy, 1628 to 1630, under Spanish rule and the plague |
| Giovanni Verga | I Malavoglia (1881) | Leader of verismo |
Modern Italian writers and Italian Nobel laureates in literature9 rows
| Writer | Work | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| Giosuè Carducci | Odi barbare and other poems | First Italian Nobel in Literature, 1906 |
| Grazia Deledda | Canne al vento | Sardinian; Nobel 1926, the first Italian woman to win it |
| Luigi Pirandello | Six Characters in Search of an Author; The Late Mattia Pascal; One, No One and One Hundred Thousand | Sicilian; Nobel 1934; masks and identity |
| Italo Svevo | Zeno's Conscience (1923) | From Trieste; a novel shaped by psychoanalysis |
| Primo Levi | If This Is a Man; The Truce; The Periodic Table | Turin chemist, survivor of Auschwitz |
| Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | The Leopard (1958) | A Sicilian prince at the time of unification |
| Italo Calvino | Invisible Cities; If on a Winter's Night a Traveller | Fantastic and experimental fiction |
| Umberto Eco | The Name of the Rose (1980) | Murder mystery in a medieval abbey |
| Elena Ferrante | My Brilliant Friend and the Neapolitan novels | Pseudonymous author; worldwide best-seller |
Watch out for (4)
- Oedipus is Greek, not Roman→ Greek epic, tragedy and comedy
- Dante lived in the 1200s and 1300s, not later→ Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio: the three crowns of Italian literature
- Giulia Beccaria was Manzoni's mother, not Dante's→ Italian classics from Machiavelli to Verga
- A famous title by someone else→ Modern Italian writers and Italian Nobel laureates in literature
Shakespeare and the English-Language Novel
Reference tables (3)
Shakespeare's plays and their settings11 rows
| Play | Type | Setting | Key characters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Romeo and Juliet | Tragedy | Verona (and Mantua) | The Montague and Capulet families |
| The Merchant of Venice | Comedy | Venice and Belmont | Shylock, Portia, Antonio |
| Othello | Tragedy | Venice, then Cyprus | Othello, Desdemona, Iago |
| The Taming of the Shrew | Comedy | Padua | Katherina, Petruchio |
| Much Ado About Nothing | Comedy | Messina, Sicily | Beatrice and Benedick |
| Julius Caesar | Roman tragedy | Rome | Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony |
| Hamlet | Tragedy | Elsinore, Denmark | Prince Hamlet, Ophelia, his uncle Claudius |
| Macbeth | Tragedy | Scotland | Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, three witches |
| King Lear | Tragedy | Ancient Britain | Lear and his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia |
| A Midsummer Night's Dream | Comedy | Athens and a nearby wood | Puck, Oberon, Titania, Bottom |
| The Tempest | Romance | A remote island | Prospero, his daughter Miranda, Caliban, Ariel |
The British and Irish novel and its famous characters13 rows
| Author | Work | Famous character | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daniel Defoe | Robinson Crusoe | Robinson Crusoe and Friday | 1719 |
| Jonathan Swift (Irish) | Gulliver's Travels | Lemuel Gulliver | 1726 |
| Jane Austen | Pride and Prejudice | Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy | 1813 |
| Mary Shelley | Frankenstein | Victor Frankenstein and his creature | 1818 |
| Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre | Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester | 1847 |
| Emily Brontë | Wuthering Heights | Heathcliff and Catherine | 1847 |
| Charles Dickens | Oliver Twist; A Christmas Carol; Great Expectations | Oliver, Fagin; Ebenezer Scrooge; Pip | 1838 to 1861 |
| Oscar Wilde (Irish) | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Dorian Gray | 1890 |
| Arthur Conan Doyle | A Study in Scarlet and later stories | Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson | From 1887 |
| James Joyce (Irish) | Ulysses | Leopold Bloom, during one day in Dublin (16 June 1904) | 1922 |
| Virginia Woolf | Mrs Dalloway; To the Lighthouse | Clarissa Dalloway; the Ramsay family | 1925; 1927 |
| George Orwell | Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four | Napoleon the pig; Winston Smith and Big Brother | 1945; 1949 |
| Aldous Huxley | Brave New World | Bernard Marx | 1932 |
American literature and its famous characters11 rows
| Author | Work | Famous character or subject | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | The Scarlet Letter | Hester Prynne, in Puritan New England | 1850 |
| Herman Melville | Moby-Dick | Captain Ahab hunts the white whale; narrator Ishmael | 1851 |
| Louisa May Alcott | Little Women | The March sisters | 1868 to 1869 |
| Mark Twain | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Huck and the escaped slave Jim on the Mississippi | 1884 |
| F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby | Jay Gatsby, narrated by Nick Carraway | 1925 |
| Ernest Hemingway | A Farewell to Arms; The Old Man and the Sea | An American ambulance driver in Italy in the First World War; the old fisherman Santiago | 1929; 1952 (Pulitzer 1953, Nobel 1954) |
| John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath | The Joad family in the Great Depression | 1939 |
| J. D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye | Holden Caulfield | 1951 |
| Jack Kerouac | On the Road | Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty | 1957 |
| Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird | Scout Finch and her father, the lawyer Atticus | 1960 (Pulitzer 1961) |
| Toni Morrison | Beloved | Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery | 1987 (Nobel 1993) |
Watch out for (3)
- Athens is not in Italy→ Shakespeare's plays and their settings
- Virginia Woolf, not "Wolf", and not Austen→ The British and Irish novel and its famous characters
- Little Women has the March sisters, not the Bennet sisters→ American literature and its famous characters
European and World Literature, Movements and the Nobel Prize
Reference tables (5)
French and Spanish-language classics10 rows
| Author | Work | Famous character | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miguel de Cervantes | Don Quixote | Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza | Spain |
| Molière | Tartuffe; The Miser | Tartuffe the hypocrite; Harpagon | France |
| Victor Hugo | Les Misérables; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame | Jean Valjean and Javert; Quasimodo and Esmeralda | France |
| Alexandre Dumas | The Count of Monte Cristo; The Three Musketeers | Edmond Dantès; d'Artagnan | France |
| Gustave Flaubert | Madame Bovary (1857) | Emma Bovary | France |
| Marcel Proust | In Search of Lost Time | The narrator Marcel and the memory of the madeleine | France |
| Albert Camus | The Stranger (1942); The Plague | Meursault; Dr Rieux | France (born in Algeria) |
| Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | The Little Prince (1943) | The little prince, the fox and the rose | France |
| Gabriel García Márquez | One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera | The Buendía family of Macondo; Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza | Colombia |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Ficciones | Short stories of labyrinths and infinite libraries | Argentina |
German-language and Russian classics10 rows
| Author | Work | Famous character or subject | Country and fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Faust; The Sorrows of Young Werther | Faust and Mephistopheles | Germany; Romantic and classical giant |
| Thomas Mann | Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain; Death in Venice | Hans Castorp in a Swiss sanatorium | Germany; Nobel 1929 |
| Franz Kafka | The Metamorphosis; The Trial | Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect; Josef K. is arrested without reason | Prague, writing in German |
| Alexander Pushkin | Eugene Onegin | Onegin and Tatiana | Russia's national poet |
| Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace; Anna Karenina | Pierre and Natasha in the Napoleonic wars; Anna's tragic love | Russia |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov | Raskolnikov the student murderer; the brothers Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha | Russia |
| Anton Chekhov | Uncle Vanya; The Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard | Plays of provincial disappointment | Russia; trained as a doctor |
| Mikhail Bulgakov | The Master and Margarita | The Devil visits Soviet Moscow | Russia; published after his death |
| Boris Pasternak | Doctor Zhivago | Yuri Zhivago and Lara | Russia; Nobel 1958, forced to refuse it |
| Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita | Humbert Humbert | Russian-born; wrote Lolita in English |
Great works from beyond Europe and their origins8 rows
| Work | Author | Origin |
|---|---|---|
| Epic of Gilgamesh | Anonymous | Mesopotamia (Iraq); the oldest surviving great poem, about 2000 BC |
| Mahabharata and Ramayana | Traditionally Vyasa and Valmiki | India, in Sanskrit; the Bhagavad Gita is part of the Mahabharata |
| The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | Japan, about 1000 |
| One Thousand and One Nights | Anonymous, told by Scheherazade | Arabic, from Persian and Indian sources |
| Masnavi and other poems | Jalal al-Din Rumi | Persian language, 13th century |
| Dream of the Red Chamber | Cao Xueqin | China, 18th century |
| Gitanjali | Rabindranath Tagore | India (Bengali); Nobel 1913 |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | Nigeria |
The Nobel Prize in Literature: laureates to know12 rows
| Writer | Year | Country | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Selma Lagerlöf | 1909 | Sweden | First woman laureate in literature |
| Rabindranath Tagore | 1913 | India | First laureate from outside Europe |
| Thomas Mann | 1929 | Germany | Buddenbrooks |
| Ernest Hemingway | 1954 | USA | The Old Man and the Sea |
| Albert Camus | 1957 | France | The Stranger |
| Pablo Neruda | 1971 | Chile | Love poems and political poetry |
| Gabriel García Márquez | 1982 | Colombia | One Hundred Years of Solitude |
| Toni Morrison | 1993 | USA | Beloved |
| Harold Pinter | 2005 | United Kingdom | Plays such as The Birthday Party |
| Doris Lessing | 2007 | United Kingdom | The Golden Notebook |
| Bob Dylan | 2016 | USA | Songwriter, the first musician to win |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | 2017 | United Kingdom (born in Japan) | The Remains of the Day |
Literary movements from Humanism to magic realism9 rows
| Movement | Period | Main idea | Writers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Humanism | 1300s to 1400s | Rediscovery of Greek and Latin classics; human dignity | Petrarch, Erasmus |
| Romanticism | About 1790 to 1850 | Emotion, nature, nation, the individual | Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Leopardi, Manzoni, Hugo |
| Realism and Naturalism | About 1850 to 1890 | Objective portraits of society; heredity and environment | Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy |
| Verismo | About 1875 to 1900, Italy | Italian realism about the poor of the South | Verga, Capuana |
| Decadentism and Symbolism | About 1880 to 1910 | Art for art's sake; suggestion and refined sensation | Baudelaire, Wilde, D'Annunzio, Pascoli |
| Modernism | About 1910 to 1940 | Stream of consciousness and fragmented time | Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Kafka, Svevo |
| Existentialism | 1940s to 1950s | Freedom, the absurd, responsibility | Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir |
| Neorealism | 1940s to 1950s, Italy | Post-war everyday life in novels and films | Pavese, Vittorini; De Sica and Rossellini in cinema |
| Magic realism | From the 1960s, Latin America | Marvellous events told as normal | García Márquez, Isabel Allende |
Watch out for (5)
- Quasimodo the hunchback, Quasimodo the poet→ French and Spanish-language classics
- Chekhov wrote the plays, Bulgakov the Moscow novel→ German-language and Russian classics
- Rumi is Persian, not Chinese or Arab→ Great works from beyond Europe and their origins
- Too early to win→ The Nobel Prize in Literature: laureates to know
- Neorealism is not Realism→ Literary movements from Humanism to magic realism
Philosophy from the Presocratics to the 20th Century, and the World's Religions
Reference tables (5)
Ancient philosophy: the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle10 rows
| Philosopher | Place and period | Central idea or work |
|---|---|---|
| Thales | Miletus, about 600 BC | The first principle of all things is water |
| Pythagoras | Samos and Croton, 6th century BC | Numbers are the basis of reality |
| Heraclitus | Ephesus, about 500 BC | Everything flows (panta rhei); reality is constant change |
| Parmenides | Elea, southern Italy, about 500 BC | Being is one and unchanging; change is an illusion |
| Democritus | Abdera, about 400 BC | Everything is made of indivisible atoms moving in the void |
| Socrates | Athens, 470 to 399 BC | Questioning method; "I know that I know nothing"; sentenced to death |
| Plato | Athens, about 428 to 348 BC | Theory of Forms; The Republic; founded the Academy |
| Aristotle | Born in Stagira, worked in Athens, 384 to 322 BC | Logic, biology, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics; founded the Lyceum; tutor of Alexander |
| Epicurus | Athens, about 300 BC | Happiness is calm pleasure and freedom from fear of death |
| The Stoics (Zeno of Citium, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius) | 300 BC to AD 180 | Live by reason; accept calmly what you cannot control |
Medieval and early modern philosophy, Augustine to Kant10 rows
| Philosopher | Country and date | Central idea or work |
|---|---|---|
| Augustine of Hippo | North Africa, about 400 | Confessions; The City of God |
| Thomas Aquinas | Italy, 13th century | Summa Theologiae: Aristotle's philosophy joined to Christian faith |
| Francis Bacon | England, 1620 | Novum Organum: knowledge by experiment and induction |
| René Descartes | France, 1637 | Discourse on the Method: "I think, therefore I am"; mind and body as separate substances |
| Thomas Hobbes | England, 1651 | Leviathan: without a strong state, life is "nasty, brutish and short" |
| Baruch Spinoza | Netherlands, 1677 | Ethics: God and Nature are one substance |
| John Locke | England, 1689 | The mind at birth is a blank slate (tabula rasa) |
| Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | Germany, about 1700 | Monads; this is the best of all possible worlds; calculus, independently of Newton |
| David Hume | Scotland, 1739 | Scepticism: we never observe causation itself, only one event following another |
| Immanuel Kant | Prussia, 1781 | Critique of Pure Reason; the categorical imperative |
Philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries15 rows
| Thinker | Country and date | Central idea or work |
|---|---|---|
| G. W. F. Hegel | Germany, 1807 | Phenomenology of Spirit; history moves by dialectic |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | Germany, 1818 | The World as Will and Representation; pessimism |
| Søren Kierkegaard | Denmark, 1840s | The individual facing choice and anxiety; a forerunner of existentialism |
| John Stuart Mill | England, 1859 and 1863 | On Liberty; Utilitarianism |
| Karl Marx | Germany, 1848 and 1867 | The Communist Manifesto (with Engels); Capital; class struggle |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Germany, 1880s | Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; "God is dead"; the Übermensch |
| Bertrand Russell | United Kingdom, 1900s to 1910s | A founder of analytic philosophy; Principia Mathematica (with Whitehead) |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein | Austria and Cambridge, 1921 and 1953 | Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Philosophical Investigations |
| Martin Heidegger | Germany, 1927 | Being and Time |
| Karl Popper | Austria and United Kingdom, 1934 | Falsifiability: a scientific theory must be testable and could be proved wrong |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | France, 1943 | Being and Nothingness: "existence precedes essence" |
| Simone de Beauvoir | France, 1949 | The Second Sex: "one is not born, but becomes, a woman" |
| Hannah Arendt | Germany and USA, 1951 and 1963 | The Origins of Totalitarianism; the "banality of evil" |
| Hans Jonas | Germany and USA, 1979 | The Imperative of Responsibility: ethics for the technological age |
| Michel Foucault | France, 1960s to 1970s | Power and knowledge; Discipline and Punish; history of madness and of the clinic |
Founders of the human sciences and their fields12 rows
| Name | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Sigmund Freud | Psychoanalysis | The unconscious; The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Analytical psychology | Archetypes and the collective unconscious |
| Ivan Pavlov | Physiology | Classical conditioning in dogs; Nobel 1904 |
| B. F. Skinner | Psychology (behaviourism) | Operant conditioning: behaviour shaped by reward |
| Jean Piaget | Developmental psychology | Stages of children's thinking |
| Maria Montessori | Pedagogy | Child-centred teaching method; among Italy's first women doctors (1896) |
| Émile Durkheim | Sociology | Suicide (1897); social facts |
| Max Weber | Sociology | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905); bureaucracy |
| Konrad Lorenz | Ethology | Imprinting in young geese; Nobel 1973 |
| Claude Lévi-Strauss | Anthropology | Structuralism |
| Noam Chomsky | Linguistics | Universal grammar |
| Max Planck | Physics | Quantum theory (1900) |
World religions: founders, sacred texts and origins9 rows
| Religion | Founder or origin | Sacred text | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|---|
| Judaism | Abraham and Moses, by tradition; Middle East | Hebrew Bible (the Torah is its first part) | Oldest of the Abrahamic religions |
| Christianity | Jesus of Nazareth, 1st century AD | The Bible (Old and New Testaments) | Largest religion in the world |
| Islam | The Prophet Muhammad, 7th century AD, Arabia | The Quran | Five Pillars; pilgrimage to Mecca |
| Hinduism | No single founder; grew over millennia in India | Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita | Among the oldest living religions |
| Buddhism | Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, about 5th century BC, India and Nepal | Pali Canon (Tripitaka) | Four Noble Truths; the Eightfold Path |
| Confucianism | Confucius, China, about 500 BC | The Analects | An ethical system of family duty and social harmony |
| Taoism | Laozi, by tradition; China | Tao Te Ching | Living in harmony with the Tao (the Way) |
| Sikhism | Guru Nanak, Punjab, about 1500 | Guru Granth Sahib | The Golden Temple at Amritsar |
| Shinto | No founder; native religion of Japan | Kojiki (ancient chronicles) | Worship of kami (spirits) at shrines |
Watch out for (5)
- Socrates wrote nothing→ Ancient philosophy: the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
- Rationalists and empiricists are not interchangeable→ Medieval and early modern philosophy, Augustine to Kant
- Hans Jonas was a philosopher, not a physician→ Philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries
- Max Weber is a sociologist, Montessori the educator→ Founders of the human sciences and their fields
- Not every religion has a founder→ World religions: founders, sacred texts and origins
Painting, Music, Opera Houses, Dance and Film
Reference tables (4)
Art movements and their painters12 rows
| Movement | Period | Artists | Hallmark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Renaissance | 1400s to 1500s, Italy | Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian | Perspective, classical balance |
| Baroque | 1600s | Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez | Drama, movement, strong light and shadow |
| Neoclassicism | About 1760 to 1830 | Jacques-Louis David, Antonio Canova | Calm forms modelled on Greece and Rome |
| Romanticism | About 1800 to 1850 | Delacroix (Liberty Leading the People), Goya, Turner, Friedrich | Emotion, nature, revolt |
| Impressionism | From 1874, France | Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot | Outdoor light and visible quick brushstrokes |
| Post-Impressionism | 1880s to 1900s | Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin; Seurat (pointillism) | Strong colour and structure |
| Fauvism | 1905 to 1908 | Henri Matisse, André Derain | Wild, unnatural colour |
| Cubism | From about 1907 | Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque | Objects broken into geometric planes seen from many sides |
| Futurism | From 1909, Italy | Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla | Speed, machines and the modern city |
| Surrealism | From 1924 | Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst | Dreams and the unconscious |
| Abstract Expressionism | 1940s to 1950s, New York | Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko | Large abstract canvases, drip painting |
| Pop Art | 1950s to 1960s | Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein | Images from advertising and comics |
Composers and their famous works11 rows
| Composer | Country | Period | Famous works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claudio Monteverdi | Italy | Early Baroque | L'Orfeo (1607), one of the first operas |
| Antonio Vivaldi | Italy (Venice) | Baroque | The Four Seasons |
| Johann Sebastian Bach | Germany | Baroque | Brandenburg Concertos; St Matthew Passion |
| Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Austria (Salzburg) | Classical | The Marriage of Figaro; Don Giovanni; The Magic Flute |
| Ludwig van Beethoven | Germany, worked in Vienna | Classical to Romantic | Nine symphonies; Fidelio |
| Gioachino Rossini | Italy (Pesaro) | 19th-century opera | The Barber of Seville; William Tell |
| Giuseppe Verdi | Italy (near Parma) | 19th-century opera | Nabucco; Rigoletto; La traviata; Aida |
| Richard Wagner | Germany | 19th-century opera | The Ring of the Nibelung; Tristan und Isolde |
| Georges Bizet | France | 19th-century opera | Carmen, set in Seville |
| Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | Russia | Romantic | Swan Lake; The Nutcracker |
| Giacomo Puccini | Italy (Lucca) | Late Romantic opera | La bohème; Tosca; Madama Butterfly (set in Nagasaki); Turandot |
Opera houses and dance traditions of the world15 rows
| Name | Type | Place |
|---|---|---|
| Teatro alla Scala | Opera house (1778) | Milan |
| La Fenice | Opera house (1792) | Venice |
| Teatro di San Carlo | Opera house (1737), the oldest still in use in Europe | Naples |
| Bolshoi Theatre | Opera and ballet | Moscow |
| Mariinsky Theatre | Opera and ballet | Saint Petersburg |
| Palais Garnier | Opera house (1875) | Paris |
| Metropolitan Opera | Opera house | New York |
| Flamenco | Dance and song | Andalusia, Spain |
| Tango | Dance | Argentina and Uruguay |
| Samba | Dance | Brazil |
| Mambo and salsa | Dance | Cuba (salsa developed further in New York) |
| Haka | Māori ceremonial dance | New Zealand |
| Bharatanatyam | Classical dance | Tamil Nadu, India |
| Tarantella | Folk dance | Southern Italy |
| Waltz | Ballroom dance | Austria and southern Germany (Vienna) |
Film directors and their best-known films16 rows
| Director | Country | Famous films |
|---|---|---|
| Roberto Rossellini | Italy | Rome, Open City (1945) |
| Vittorio De Sica | Italy | Bicycle Thieves (1948) |
| Federico Fellini | Italy | La strada; La dolce vita; 8½; Amarcord |
| Michelangelo Antonioni | Italy | L'avventura; Blow-Up |
| Sergio Leone | Italy | The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in the West |
| Roberto Benigni | Italy | Life Is Beautiful (1997, three Oscars) |
| Paolo Sorrentino | Italy | The Great Beauty (Oscar 2014) |
| Matteo Garrone | Italy | Gomorrah (2008) |
| Alfred Hitchcock | United Kingdom, then USA | Psycho; Vertigo; Rear Window |
| Stanley Kubrick | USA, worked in the UK | 2001: A Space Odyssey; A Clockwork Orange; The Shining |
| Francis Ford Coppola | USA | The Godfather trilogy; Apocalypse Now |
| Martin Scorsese | USA | Taxi Driver; Goodfellas |
| Steven Spielberg | USA | Jaws; E.T.; Schindler's List |
| François Truffaut | France | The 400 Blows (French New Wave) |
| Ingmar Bergman | Sweden | The Seventh Seal |
| Akira Kurosawa | Japan | Rashomon; Seven Samurai |
Watch out for (4)
- Pointillism is not Impressionism→ Art movements and their painters
- Puccini, Verdi, Rossini: three Italians, different operas→ Composers and their famous works
- Flamenco is Spanish, the tango is South American→ Opera houses and dance traditions of the world
- Italian-American is not Italian→ Film directors and their best-known films
PYQ weightage by concept
21 concepts · 0 PYQs — where the marks actually sit, so you know what to drill first
PYQ weightage by concept
21 concepts · 0 PYQs — where the marks actually sit, so you know what to drill first
Greek Classics and Italian Literature from Dante to Ferrante0 PYQs · 0%
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Greek epic, tragedy and comedyfoundation | — | — |
| Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio: the three crowns of Italian literaturefoundation | — | — |
| Italian classics from Machiavelli to Vergafoundation | — | — |
| Modern Italian writers and Italian Nobel laureates in literaturefoundation | — | — |
Shakespeare and the English-Language Novel0 PYQs · 0%
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Shakespeare's plays and their settingsfoundation | — | — |
| The British and Irish novel and its famous charactersfoundation | — | — |
| American literature and its famous charactersfoundation | — | — |
European and World Literature, Movements and the Nobel Prize0 PYQs · 0%
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| French and Spanish-language classicsfoundation | — | — |
| German-language and Russian classicsfoundation | — | — |
| Great works from beyond Europe and their originsfoundation | — | — |
| The Nobel Prize in Literature: laureates to knowfoundation | — | — |
| Literary movements from Humanism to magic realismfoundation | — | — |
Philosophy from the Presocratics to the 20th Century, and the World's Religions0 PYQs · 0%
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient philosophy: the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotlefoundation | — | — |
| Medieval and early modern philosophy, Augustine to Kantfoundation | — | — |
| Philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuriesfoundation | — | — |
| Founders of the human sciences and their fieldsfoundation | — | — |
| World religions: founders, sacred texts and originsfoundation | — | — |
Painting, Music, Opera Houses, Dance and Film0 PYQs · 0%
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Art movements and their paintersfoundation | — | — |
| Composers and their famous worksfoundation | — | — |
| Opera houses and dance traditions of the worldfoundation | — | — |
| Film directors and their best-known filmsfoundation | — | — |