The twentieth century produced British cultural figures of international stature in every field. Sir Edward Elgar wrote the Pomp and Circumstance marches; Benjamin Britten wrote the opera Peter Grimes and the War Requiem. Sculptor Henry Moore produced large abstract works for public spaces; Barbara Hepworth carved in St Ives in Cornwall; David Hockney moved between Bradford, California and Yorkshire painting some of the most recognisable images of the period.
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In literature, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie all shaped twentieth-century writing. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones changed popular music in the 1960s. Architects such as Norman Foster and Richard Rogers gave modern Britain some of its most striking buildings.
You may be asked who composed the War Requiem (Benjamin Britten), or which Yorkshire-born artist painted A Bigger Splash (David Hockney).
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