Q. If there is one type of book we read over and over, it’s picture books. As young children, as parents, as sentimental sorts of all ages. Which English language picture books have been consistently most popular over the last decades? . A. Tracking all sales in all modes in

Q. What were the original, screenplay, or code names of some well-known movies? . A. Code Name X Those who live in movie towns are used to seeing ‘movie filming here’ arrows with runic symbols or odd code names. How long can they keep superfans at bay? Warner Brothers tried

Q. That’s The Blues. We know it when we hear it,  but why is this form of music called: ‘The Blues’? . A. The Blues – with its roots in Africa and the late 1800s US Deep South – is deeply emotional music. As Wynton Marsalis says in a 2020

Q. Which classical pieces are most widely beloved? . A. It’s Ralph Vaughan Williams for the win. After more than 156,000 votes, Classic FM compiled their 2021 Hall of Fame Top 300 list of the year’s favourite classical pieces. Still reigning at Number One? Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’, for the

Q. What do Louis Armstrong, Kermit The Frog, Janet Jackson, and Thomas Edison have in common? . A. All four of these creators are behind recordings that have been selected to be painstakingly preserved by the Library of Congress. Every year, the United States’ Library of Congress National Recording Preservation

Q. Which books are people most likely to pretend they’ve read? . A. In a Telegraph study of 2,000 Brits, 62% of respondents admitted to telling others that they had read classic books they hadn’t so much as skimmed. 42% confessed to hunting down the film or TV version of

Q. Between pandemic lockdowns and self-seeding streaming channels, movie grosses have been much in the news. Which movies have the top grosses of all time? . A. Before revealing the results from IMDb Pro’s Box Office Mojo, let’s see how many of these top grossing movies we can identify from

Q. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! What are your go-to Christmas carols or songs?  Which holiday songs are most broadly favoured? . A. Classic FM has just wrapped up their 2021 Nation’s Favourite Carol poll and the winner, once again, is: O Holy Night. Classic FM’s 2021 Favourite Carol

Q. What’s your happy song? What’s that song you put on when you want to hype yourself up, to take yourself from a mildly good mood to flat out glee? And what is it about that song that inspires happiness? . A. First: is your happy song on any of

Q. Artist eyes see beauty in the things we discard. What are some examples of artists celebrating the well-worn, the battered, and the broken? . A. .   In Ceramics Artist Naoko Fukumaru 2021 Website Statement ‘Kintsugi, the art of golden joinery, is a five-hundred-year-old Japanese method of restoring damaged