25. Pair the word with the writer who coined it:
a) Feminist
b) Earthshaking
c) Subcontract
d) Pedestrian
i) William Wordsworth
ii) John Milton
iii) Alexandre Dumas
iv) William Shakespeare
26. Who as a young man found his own name so “embarrassingly dull” that he called himself Aaron Azimuth?
a) Jean Genet
b) John Fowles
c) Barry Humphries
d) Norman Mailer
27. When working as a shop assistant, which future novelist fell in love at first sight with a customer, then wrote in a notebook: “Yesterday, I felt quite close to murder … murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing … to make her in an instant cool and rigid as a statue”?
a) Patrick Hamilton
b) Ruth Rendell
c) Patricia Highsmith
d) Iris Murdoch
28. Which poet once confessed to the wife of the prime minister that he found the suede-lined lift at No 10 “very erotic”?
a) Ted Hughes
b) Philip Larkin
c) Craig Raine
d) John Betjeman
Sarah Churchwell
29. F Scott Fitzgerald based the party scenes in The Great Gatsby in part on the work of which poet?
a) William Blake
b) John Keats
c) Lord Byron
d) Percy Bysshe Shelley
30. Henry James got the idea for The Turn of the Screw from a story told to him by which person?
a) William James
b) George du Maurier
c) The Archbishop of Canterbury
d) John Singer Sargent
31. Who said “The only difference between the rich and other people is the rich have more money”?
a) Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald
b) F Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway
c) Sara Murphy to F Scott Fitzgerald
d) Mary Colum to Ernest Hemingway
Emma Healey
32. Vendela Vida’s fourth novel, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, was published this year. What does it have in common with Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia?
a) They all include scenes set in Morocco
b) They all feature repeated opening chapters
c) They are all written using the second-person narrative form
33. Titles beginning with the words “The Girl” have been very popular this year, but which of these novels wasn’t published in 2015?
a) The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
b) The Girl With All the Gifts by MR Carey
c) The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer
d) The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz
34. Whose 1960s bestseller was reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic this year?
a) Penelope Fitzgerald
b) Penelope Mortimer
c) Penelope Lively
Patrick Barkham
35. What is the name of Helen Macdonald’s goshawk in H Is for Hawk?
a) Harry
b) Gos
c) Mabel
36. In Ada, Nabokov wrote that the birthplace of his heroine’s mother is Ladoga. This is a lake in Russia and a sly reference to what else?
a) A model of Dacia car that Nabokov drove
b) A disused scientific name for the white admiral butterfly
c) The name of a troublesome puppy bought by his wife, Vera, in 1960
37. What do nature writers Richard Mabey, Simon Barnes and Mark Cocker have in common?
a) A visceral dislike of football
b) Homes overlooking Norfolk marshes
c) They all own labradoodles
Anthony Horowitz
38. Which character was supposedly based on Charles Dickens’s father?
a) Wilkins Micawber
b) Bill Sykes
c) Samuel Pickwick
39. Ormond Sacker was the original name of which famous character?
a) James Moriarty
b) Dr John Watson
c) Henry Baskerville
40. Which of the following is a James Bond short story by Ian Fleming?
a) “Property of a Lady”
b) “The Hildebrand Variety”
c) “007 in New York”
Mark Lawson
41. Baroness Rendell of Babergh AKA crime writer Ruth Rendell died in May. Which two of these crime or thriller writers have not been a member of the British House of Lords?
a) PD James
b) Michael Dobbs
c) GK Chesterton
d) Jeffrey Archer
e) Baroness Orczy
42. Which of the following does not serve as a murder weapon in a story by Agatha Christie?
a) Hay fever spray
b) A ukulele string
c) A jar of marmalade
d) A bow-tie
e) A dart
43. Which of these names is not a pseudonym used for crime fiction by a writer better known for other types of writing?
a) Peter Anthony
b) Brynjolf Bjarme
c) Nicholas Blake
d) Dan Kavanagh
e) Rosamond Smith
James Meek
44. Which is Goethe’s young Werther’s actual complaint to his adored Lotte about her letters?
a) The sand she uses to dry the ink gets between his teeth when he kisses the letters
b) The paper she writes on is too hard and smooth to absorb her perfume
c) The ink leaves a mirror-print of her words on his cheek when he falls asleep with the letters on his pillow
45. Which of these wild animals is not used by characters in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native?
a) Adders, for their medicinal fat
b) Badgers, for their bristles
c) Glow-worms, for their light
46. In Mary McCarthy’s The Group, what fear of Harald Petersen’s does Lakey Eastlake exploit?
a) That his wife knew he was sleeping around
b) That the girls mocked his artistic pretensions behind his back
c) That Lakey slept with his wife at college
47. What is it about the theatre buffet manager in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita that most infuriates Woland?
a) He offers sturgeon of the “second freshness”
b) He sells caviar by the egg
c) He sells watered-down alcohol as “ladies’ vodka”
John Mullan
48. Which famous novel was initially entitled Strangers from Within by its author?
a) Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
b) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
c) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
d) The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
49. Who published her first novel under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas?
a) Muriel Spark
b) Sylvia Plath
c) Ruth Rendell
d) Margaret Atwood
50. Who is the only Jane Austen character to call her husband by his first name?
a) Mrs Elton
b) Mrs Bennet
c) Mrs Croft
d) Mary Musgrove
2015 in books – have you been paying attention?
