Think you know all there is to know about the World Cup’s origins? If so, you’ll know that before the birth of world championship football in 1930… there was world championship football. You’ll also know all about the one-armed fox in the box, the tale of the two-ball diplomatic crisis, the Battle of Buenos Aires, and the story of the Romanian midfielder who rose from the dead and scared the life out of his mum.

When Beethoven's final symphonic offering ode-ed joyously in the Austrian capital in May 1824, few would've thought they were listening to the simultaneous apotheosis of a revolutionary composer and the extensive canon of Western music itself. Most would've been thinking about the cost of the interval ice creams and that weird bit at the end of the gig when some deaf old fella with a face like a freshly slapped derriere had a crack at 'conducting'...

"Probably the best film in the world...?" Many of us of a certain vintage will remember Orson Welles for the memorable marriage of his distinctive monotone with one of the world's best known adverts for Danish lager, but in 1941 he was a young man with no experience of filmmaking rewriting the filmmaker's playbook. Citizen Kane's mark could be seen in everything that followed, even if it didn't know its Rosebud from its elbow...