TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you're given passages that contain mentions of names of people, places, or things. Some of these mentions refer to the same person, place, or thing. Your job is to write questions that evaluate one's understanding of such references. Good questions are expected to link pronouns (she, her, him, his, their, etc.) or other mentions to people, places, or things to which they may refer. Do not ask questions that can be answered correctly without understanding the paragraph or having multiple answers. Avoid questions that do not link phrases referring to the same entity. For each of your questions, the answer should be one or more phrases in the paragraph, and it should be unambiguous.
PROBLEM: Passage: Possibly because of its size, The Sirens and Ulysses failed to sell at the 1837 Summer Exhibition. In October 1837 wealthy Manchester cotton merchant Daniel Grant, an admirer of Etty who had already commissioned Venus and her Doves from him, met Etty at Heaton Park races and offered to buy The Sirens and Ulysses and Etty's smaller Samson Betrayed by Delilah unseen for a total of £200. Etty was hoping for £400 for the two paintings, but on being told by Grant that his firm had lost £100,000 that year offered a price of £300 for the pair. Grant counter-offered £250 (about £22,000 in today's terms), which Etty refused. On leaving at the end of the evening, Grant suddenly said, "Will you take the money?", startling Etty, who in his surprise agreed. Grant died shortly afterwards, leaving the painting to his brother William, who in turn gave it to the Royal Manchester Institution in 1839.Etty considered the painting to be his best work, insisting that it form the centrepiece of his 1849 Royal Society of Arts solo exhibition. The Royal Manchester Institution was concerned that the painting would be damaged if moved, refusing to allow it to be used in the exhibition until Etty, and a number of influential friends, visited Manchester to beg them to release it. Etty died later that year, and his work enjoyed a brief boom in popularity. Interest in him declined over time, and by the end of the 19th century the cost of all his paintings had fallen below their original prices. As it was rarely exhibited, The Sirens and Ulysses had little influence on later artists, although it is credited as an influence on Frederic Leighton's 1858 The Fisherman and the Syren.
Ulysses and the Sirens is one of those great efforts of my Art achieved in the vigour of my life, I can never make again.

SOLUTION: What were the names of what Etty was hoping to get £400 for?

PROBLEM: Passage: The opening melody is played by a solo bassoon in a very high register, which renders the instrument almost unidentifiable; gradually other woodwind instruments are sounded and are eventually joined by strings. The sound builds up before stopping suddenly, Hill says, "just as it is bursting ecstatically into bloom". There is then a reiteration of the opening bassoon solo, now played a semitone lower.
The first dance, "Augurs of Spring", is characterised by a repetitive stamping chord in the horns and strings, based on E♭ dominant 7 superimposed on a triad of E, G♯ and B. White suggests that this bitonal combination, which Stravinsky considered the focal point of the entire work, was devised on the piano, since the constituent chords are comfortable fits for the hands on a keyboard. The rhythm of the stamping is disturbed by Stravinsky's constant shifting of the accent, on and off the beat, before the dance ends in a collapse, as if from exhaustion. Alex Ross has summed up the pattern as follows:
According to Roger Nichols (1978, p7) “At first sight there seems no pattern in the distribution of accents to the stamping chords.  Taking the initial quaver of bar 1 as a natural accent we have for the first outburst the following groups of quavers: 9, 2, 6, 3, 4, 5, 3. However, these apparently random numbers make sense when split into two groups:
Clearly the top line is decreasing, the bottom line increasing, and by respectively decreasing and increasing amounts …Whether Stravinsky worked them out like this we shall probably never know.  But the way two different rhythmic ‘orders’ interfere with each other to produced apparent chaos is… a typically Stravinskyan notion." The "Ritual of Abduction" which follows is described by Hill as "the most terrifying of musical hunts". It concludes in a series of flute trills that usher in the "Spring Rounds", in which a slow and laborious theme gradually rises to a dissonant fortissimo, a "ghastly caricature" of the episode's main tune.
Brass and percussion predominate as the "Ritual of the Rival Tribes" begins. A tune emerges on tenor and bass tubas, leading after much repetition to the entry of the Sage's procession. The music then comes to a virtual halt, "bleached free of colour" (Hill), as the Sage blesses the earth. The "Dance of the Earth" then begins, bringing Part I to a close in a series of phrases of the utmost vigour which are abruptly terminated in what Hill describes as a "blunt, brutal amputation".

SOLUTION: What concludes in a series of flute trills that usher in the "Spring Rounds"?

PROBLEM: Passage: Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat. It is among the most famous gardens in England and is designated Grade I on Historic England's register of historic parks and gardens. It was bought by Sackville-West in 1930, and over the next thirty years, working with, and later succeeded by, a series of notable head gardeners, she and Nicolson transformed a farmstead of "squalor and slovenly disorder" into one of the world's most influential gardens. Following Sackville-West's death in 1962, the estate was donated to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. It is one of the Trust's most popular properties, with nearly 200,000 visitors in 2017.
The gardens contain an internationally respected plant collection, particularly the assemblage of old garden roses. The writer Anne Scott-James considered the roses at Sissinghurst to be "one of the finest collections in the world". A number of plants propagated in the gardens bear names related to people connected with Sissinghurst or the name of the garden itself. The garden design is based on axial walks that open onto enclosed gardens, termed "garden rooms", one of the earliest examples of this gardening style. Among the individual "garden rooms", the White Garden has been particularly influential, with the horticulturalist Tony Lord describing it as "the most ambitious ... of its time, the most entrancing of its type."The site of Sissinghurst is ancient and has been occupied since at least the Middle Ages. The present-day buildings began as a house built in the 1530s by Sir John Baker. In 1554 Sir John's daughter Cecily married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, an ancestor of Vita Sackville-West. By the 18th century the Baker's fortunes had waned, and the house, renamed Sissinghurst Castle, was leased to the government to act as a prisoner-of-war camp during the Seven Years' War. The prisoners caused great damage and by the 19th century much of Sir Richard's house had been demolished. In the mid-19th century, the remaining buildings were in use as a workhouse, and by the 20th century Sissinghurst had declined to the status of a farmstead. In 1928 the castle was advertised for sale but remained unsold for two years.

SOLUTION:
What are the full names of the poet/writer and author/diplomat who are married?