2. Dalí was just 14 when his work was first exhibited as part of a show in his home town, and at 17 admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. Why was he expelled three years later without a diploma?

1. For declaring, “I am infinitely more intelligent than these professors and I therefore refuse to be examined by them”
2. For vandalising the examinination hall with tins of paint, declaring the institution “staid and despicable” and “unworthy” of his work
3. For sleeping with his professor's daughter

3. Dalí met Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, his future wife, at his family's holiday home on the Mediterranean coast in 1929. To whom was she married at the time?

1. Playwright Federico Garcia Lorca
2. French poet Paul Eluard
3. Lancastrian singer and strummer George Formby

4. As his fame grew, Dalí's reputation was boosted by his outrageous pronouncements. Who, notoriously, did he say came to him in a dream as “a woman” whose flesh “ravished me”?

1. Adolf Hitler
2. Jesus Christ
3. Winston Churchill

5. Dalí was a great admirer of comedian Harpo Marx and travelled to Paris to meet him in 1936. A few months later, Dalí sent Marx a Christmas present. What was it?

1. A clock made of cheese
2. A collection of costume moustaches made from real hair
3. A harp made of barbed wire and spoons

6. “One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.” Said who?

1. George Orwell
2. Andre Breton
3. Mae West

7. The Dream of Venus, Dalí's surrealist pavillion for the 1939 World's Fair took months to assemble and its opening was twice postponed. When the show was finally ready, the painter's own press release opened with what statement?

1. Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dalí
2. Salvador Dalí ate my hamster
3. Is Dalí insane?

8. In 1944, Dalí signed up to work with Alfred Hitchcock on a dream sequence for the film Spellbound. Dalí originally designed a set involving grand pianos suspended from the ceiling with dancers pirouetting beneath, but MGM said no. What did they offer instead, to the artist's horror?

1. That they build a miniature version of the set, featuring model pianos, and employ a troupe of dwarves
2. That Walt Disney draw a cartoon version of the scene
3. That Dalí star in the scene and play the pianos himself

1. 8
2. 4
3. 23