Ian Rankin
1. “What strikes me now as it never has before is that I can’t say my prayers went unanswered.” A quote from a startling memoir published this year. But by whom?
a) Chrissie Hynde
b) Cathy Rentzenbrink
c) Antonia Fraser
2. Ruth Rendell’s final novel was published after her death this year. What is its title?
a) Dark Edges
b) Dark Places
c) Dark Corners
3. Whose latest poetry collection is 40 Sonnets?
a) Don Paterson
b) Carol Ann Duffy
c) Craig Raine
Sarah Waters
4. Of which novelist did Katherine Mansfield complain that he “never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea”?
a) Joseph Conrad
b) EM Forster
c) Henry James
5. Which classic novel did Mark Twain dislike so intensely that he wanted “to dig up [its author] and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone”?
a) Middlemarch
b) Jane Eyre
c) Pride and Prejudice
6. Which author stated that “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector”?
a) Ernest Hemingway
b) Kingsley Amis
c) Angela Carter
David Hare
7. Of which French film star did Charles Spaak write: “One can admire him for the films he’s made, but also for the films he’s spared us”?
a) Jean Gabin
b) Gérard Depardieu
c) Maurice Chevalier
8. Who, on being told that André Gide had declared him the best writer in America, responded: “Tell that fag to take me out of his mouth”?
a) Ernest Hemingway
b) Norman Mailer
c) Dashiell Hammett
9. Which Welsh poet, on being asked whether he was lonely now his wife was dead, replied: “Yes, but I was often lonely while she was alive”?
a) Dylan Thomas
b) RS Thomas
c) Edward Thomas
William Boyd
10. The surname of the eponymous character in Nabokov’s novel Lolita is:
a) Hain
b) Hare
c) Haze
11. Which vegetable features in the title of Craig Raine’s famous first collection of poetry?
a) Carrot
b) Onion
c) Parsnip
12. Which musical instrument unites the unlikely trio of Joan Crawford, Wallace Stevens and Elvis Presley?
a) Guitar
b) Flute
c) Piano
John Lanchester
13. In the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter reports that he once ate a census-taker’s liver with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti”. This is a change from the novel, in which he eats it with some fava beans and:
a) a big St-Estèphe
b) a big Amarone
c) a big Châteauneuf-du-Pape
14. In the movie version of From Russia With Love, while on the Orient Express, James Bond and Tatiana Romanova drink a bottle of Taittinger Blanc de Blancs with their sole. The Spectre assassin Donald Grant ordersa Chianti. The waiter offers him a white Chianti and Grant says:
a) “Yes, please”
b) “No, the red kind”
c) “On second thoughts, I’ll have what they’re having”
15. The earliest mention of a first-growth Bordeaux wine in English literature, predating the classification of the wines in 1855, is of Château Haut-Brion. It comes in:
a) Pepys’s diary in 1663
b) Pope’s Dunciad of 1728
c) Byron’s Don Juan in 1819
Antony Beevor
16. In which novel did Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring skip round searching for deer droppings as if he were on an Easter egg hunt?
a) The Kindly Ones / Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell
b) The Erl-King / Le Roi des Aulnes by Michel Tournier
c) Crabwalk / Im Krebsgang by Günter Grass
17. What was the name of the anthology of poems written by members of the British forces during the second world war in North Africa and Italy, which included work by Spike Milligan, Enoch Powell, Quintin Hogg, Erik de Mauny and Harry Secombe?
a) Oasis
b) Dune
c) The Palm Tree
18. In Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, who is the biological father of Virginia Troy’s child?
a) Tommy Backhouse
b) Guy Crouchback
c) Trimmer
19. In Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, who telephones the physicist Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum in the middle of the night?
a) Beria
b) Stalin
c) Molotov
Alexandra Harris
20. What does Henry Purcell’s opera King Arthur have in common with Isis by Jean-Baptiste Lully?
a) Stage directions for skaters
b) A musical score for shivering
c) The only recorded use of artificial snow before 1800
21. Who first used the phrase “They steal my thunder”?
a) John Dennis on seeing a production of Macbeth in 1733
b) David Garrick after playing Prometheus in 1770
c) John Martin when robbers took his paints in 1822
22. Which of the following is accom-panied by the “To-whoo” of an owl?
a) The icicles in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
b) The icicles in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
c) The icicles in Love’s Labour’s Lost
23. Virginia Woolf wrote about all of the following, but of which did she actually have experience?
a) Flying over London
b) Dining in Manhattan
c) Travelling on mules in Spain
24. If you want to visit Jingdezhen, would you take:
a) The Green Road by Anne Enright
b) The White Road by Edmund de Waal
c) The Cinder Path by Andrew Motion
