Arts and culture for the Life in the UK test

Classical music

Henry Purcell

A 17th-century organist at Westminster Abbey. He wrote church music and operas, such as Dido and Aeneas.

George Frederick Handel

Born in Germany, he became a British citizen in 1727. He wrote the Water Music for George I and the oratorio Messiah.

Gustav Holst

Wrote The Planets, an orchestral suite of seven movements, each named after a planet. Part of it became the hymn tune I vow to thee my country.

Sir Edward Elgar

Wrote the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. The first, 'Land of Hope and Glory', is sung on the Last Night of the Proms.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Wrote orchestral and choral music that draws heavily on traditional English folk music.

Sir William Walton

Wrote Façade, Belshazzar's Feast, film scores, and coronation marches for George VI and Elizabeth II.

Benjamin Britten

Wrote the opera Peter Grimes and A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. He founded the Aldeburgh Festival in Suffolk.

The Proms

Eight weeks of summer concerts, mainly at the Royal Albert Hall. Sir Henry Wood first conducted them in 1895, and the BBC has run them since 1927.

Pop music, festivals and awards

• British pop and rock bands have influenced the world since the 1960s, 'the Swinging Sixties', the decade of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
• Music festivals such as Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight Festival draw huge crowds.
• The National Eisteddfod is a Welsh festival of music and poetry that celebrates Welsh culture.
• The Mercury Prize is an award for the best UK or Irish album.
• The Brit Awards honour British groups and solo artists.

Theatre

London's West End is the centre of British theatre. The Laurence Olivier Awards honour London theatre.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Wrote musicals including Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

Gilbert and Sullivan

Wrote 19th-century comic operas such as HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado.

Pantomime

A Christmas show based on a fairy story. It has a Dame, a female character traditionally played by a man.

The Mousetrap

Agatha Christie's murder-mystery play. It opened in the West End in 1952 and has run without a break ever since, the longest first run of any show.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The largest part of the Edinburgh Festival each summer. It mainly shows theatre and comedy, much of it experimental.

Painting and sculpture

• Other names to know: Sir John Lavery, a portrait painter born in Belfast; John Petts, known for engravings and stained glass; and David Allan, who painted The Origin of Painting.

Hans Holbein and Sir Anthony Van Dyck

Painters from abroad who worked for English kings: Holbein (German) for Henry VIII, and Van Dyck (Flemish) for Charles I.

Thomas Gainsborough

An 18th-century portrait painter who often set the people he painted in country or garden scenery.

John Constable

A landscape painter famous for his views of Dedham Vale, on the border of Suffolk and Essex, including The Hay Wain.

J M W Turner

A landscape painter who did much to raise the status of landscape painting. The Turner Prize for contemporary art, set up in 1984, is named after him.

The Pre-Raphaelites

A 19th-century group, including Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Millais, who painted detailed, brightly coloured religious and literary scenes.

Henry Moore

An English artist famous for large, often abstract sculptures, many of them cast in bronze.

Lucian Freud and David Hockney

Freud was a German-born painter famous for his portraits. Hockney was a leading figure in 1960s pop art.

Architecture and gardens

Britain has great medieval cathedrals, such as Durham, Lincoln, Canterbury and Salisbury. York Minster is famous for its stained glass. Gothic revival buildings include St Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament.

Inigo Jones

A 17th-century architect who designed the Banqueting House in Whitehall and the Queen's House at Greenwich.

Sir Christopher Wren

Designed the new St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Robert Adam

An 18th-century Scottish architect who designed interiors as well as buildings, such as Culzean Castle.

Sir Edwin Lutyens

Planned New Delhi as the seat of government of India and designed the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid

Architects of major modern buildings, such as Foster's 'Gherkin' (30 St Mary Axe), Rogers's Lloyd's building and Hadid's London Aquatics Centre.

Capability Brown and Gertrude Jekyll

Garden designers. Brown created natural-looking parkland in the 18th century. Jekyll made colourful gardens, often for houses by Lutyens.

Fashion and design

Thomas Chippendale

An 18th-century furniture designer.

Clarice Cliff

Created Art Deco ceramics.

Terence Conran

A 20th-century interior designer.

Mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen

British fashion designers. Quant helped to make the miniskirt popular in the 1960s.

Novels and plays

• Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall, Scoop, Brideshead Revisited) and Graham Greene (Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana) were leading novelists of the 1930s.
• Sir Kingsley Amis's first novel was Lucky Jim.
• The Booker Prize is awarded each year for the best novel, not for poetry. The handbook calls it the Man Booker Prize.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Winners include the novelist William Golding, the poet Seamus Heaney and the playwright Harold Pinter. Rudyard Kipling won it in 1907.

Jane Austen

Wrote Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

Charles Dickens

Wrote Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol, the story of Scrooge.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Wrote Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Thomas Hardy

Wrote novels about rural life, such as Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A Scottish doctor who created the detective Sherlock Holmes.

Poetry

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales are poems in English about pilgrims telling stories on the way to Canterbury. Shakespeare wrote many sonnets, and a sonnet always has 14 lines. Many famous poets are buried or remembered in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Beowulf

An Anglo-Saxon poem about a hero who fights monsters. It is still read today in modern English translations.

John Milton

Wrote the 17th-century epic poem Paradise Lost, from a Protestant viewpoint.

William Wordsworth

A Romantic poet of nature. His poem The Daffodils begins 'I wander'd lonely as a cloud'.

Lord Byron and Robert Browning

Byron wrote She Walks in Beauty. Browning wrote Home Thoughts from Abroad.

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon

Poets of the First World War, in which they both served as soldiers. Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth mourns the soldiers who died.

Dylan Thomas

A Welsh poet, born in Swansea, who wrote the radio play Under Milk Wood and the poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.

Film

The first public film screenings in the UK took place in 1896, and cinema quickly became popular. During the Second World War, British films such as In Which We Serve helped to boost morale.

• The James Bond and Harry Potter film series were made largely in the UK.
• The BAFTAs are the British film awards, Britain's equivalent of the Oscars.

Charlie Chaplin

A London-born star of Hollywood silent films, famous for playing a tramp.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock

Began in British films, directing The 39 Steps (1935), then moved to Hollywood, where he made Psycho.

Sir David Lean

Directed Brief Encounter and Lawrence of Arabia.

Ealing Studios

Made comedies such as Passport to Pimlico and The Ladykillers. It claims to be the world's oldest film studio still in continuous use.

Nick Park

An animator who has won four Oscars, three of them for Wallace and Gromit films.

Comedy

• British comedy has a long satirical tradition, from court jesters to music hall and television.
• Punch, launched in the 1840s, was the best-known satirical magazine of its time. Private Eye carries on that tradition today.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus was first shown in 1969 and brought a new style of comedy to television.
• That Was The Week That Was and Spitting Image were satirical TV shows that poked fun at politicians and public figures.
• Situation comedies, or sitcoms, often find humour in family life and relationships at work.