Shelf abuse: spot the authors' putdowns - quiz

Lining up a zinger ... Gore Vidal in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

1. 

   “Extinguish is a transitive verb, you bollock-faced foghorn of ignorance.” Who was Philip Pullman schooling in the proper use of English, after they wrote that “The rights and obligations deriving from the Treaties would therefore extinguish"?

   1. Theresa May

   2. Michael Gove

   3. Nigel Farage

   4. Donald Trump

2. Who was Bret Easton Ellis describing when he tweeted: “The best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn't able to achieve”?

   1. Martin Amis

   2. Marlon James

   3. David Foster Wallace

   4. Dave Eggers

3. 

   JK Rowling has become known for her Twitter put-downs. Which of the following did she NOT tweet?

   1. “The Internet doesn’t just offer opportunities for misogynistic abuse, you know. Penis enlargers can also be bought discreetly.”

   2. “The fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologism of celebrity toady Piers Morgan is, of course, why it's so delicious to see him told to fuck off."

   3. “I was born Christian. If that makes Rupert Murdoch my responsibility, I'll auto-excommunicate.”

   4. “My God, what an appalling, lying, dangerous little fuckturnip Trump is.”

4. And which writer said of Rowling’s fondness for a tweet that “Creating this mass following and tweeting several times a day is like wanting to be Cheryl or Kim Kardashian. Some writers like JK Rowling have this insatiable need and desire to be out there all the time, and that’s entirely driven by their ego”?

   1. Joanna Trollope

   2. Joyce Carol Oates

   3. William Boyd

   4. Elena Ferrante

5. 

   With whom did Ernest Hemingway have a long-running feud, a fellow writer who was quoted as saying of Papa that “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary”?

   1. Mark Twain

   2. William Faulkner

   3. F Scott Fitzgerald

   4. George Orwell

6. Who described James Joyce's Ulysses thusly? “Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”

   1. DH Lawrence

   2. Virginia Woolf

   3. JD Salinger

   4. Vladimir Nabokov

7. 

   “Emotionally primitive and intellectually barbaric…” What was Martin Amis describing?

   1. Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell

   2. Ian McEwan’s novel Solar

   3. Donald Trump’s manifesto

   4. The Daily Mail

8. Who said of the playwright Lillian Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”, prompting a lawsuit for millions of dollars?

   1. Gertrude Stein

   2. Edith Wharton

   3. Gore Vidal

   4. Mary McCarthy

9. 

   Which of the following did Gore Vidal say to Norman Mailer?

   1. On his writing: “No more interesting than the stomach of an intellectual cow”

   2. After Mailer knocked him to the ground at a party: “Norman, once again words have failed you.”

   3. “Fold it five ways and shove it where the moon don’t shine”

   4. “The only genius I've ever known with an IQ of 60.”

10. "A man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head." Who on who?

    1. Christopher Hitchens on John Le Carre

    2. Salman Rushdie on John Le Carre

    3. John Le Carre on Salman Rushdie

    4. Katie Price on Christopher Hitchens

Solutions

1:C, 2:C, 3:D - Credit for this one goes to Patrick Ness., 4:A, 5:B, 6:A - But Woolf also wasn't a fan, writing: "I finished Ulysses and think it is a mis-fire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred.”, 7:C, 8:D, 9:B - The first option was Mailer on Vidal., 10:A

Scores

1. 9 and above.

   Well done! Even Gore Vidal wouldn't have a put-down for you.

2. 8 and above.

   Well done! Even Gore Vidal wouldn't have a put-down for you.

3. 6 and above.

   Not bad! Maybe try again - not like Samuel Johnson, who once said: "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is."

4. 5 and above.

   As Stephen King said of Trump: "Worse than any horror story I ever wrote."

5. 3 and above.

   As Charles Baudelaire once called Voltaire: "The king of nincompoops!"

6. 2 and above.

   As Charles Baudelaire once called Voltaire: "The king of nincompoops!"

7. 4 and above.

   As Stephen King said of Trump: "Worse than any horror story I ever wrote."

8. 7 and above.

   Not bad! Maybe try again - not like Samuel Johnson, who once said: "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is."

9. 0 and above.

   As Charles Baudelaire once called Voltaire: "The king of nincompoops!"

10. 10 and above.

    Well done! Even Gore Vidal wouldn't have a put-down for you.