Test your literary knowledge to win 50 Oxford World’s Classics
The answer to each question is a book published in the newly relaunched Oxford World’s Classics series. In each case, we need the title and the author.
1 “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end; then stop.’”Good advice for anyone doing a prize quiz.From which book does it come?
2 “Like the drip, drip, drip of the raindrops when the summer shower is through . . .” When are you “the one”?
3 What was the first single written and performed by a woman to reach No 1 in the UK?
4 Regular to a fault, they win the main Cup competition every 50 years. Already the smart money is on a 2056 victory. Who?
5 “I’m no angel” is often attributed to Mae West. In fact, the words were first uttered by the heroine of which 1848 novel?
AMERICAN LITERATURE
6 It was farmland until April 1797, when the Common Council of New York bought it as a burial ground. It came in particularly useful during the yellow fever epidemics of the early 1800s, and 20,000 bodies rest beneath it still. Which New York park?
7 What is the surname of the man who took over from Peter Jay in 1977 and handed over to Matthew Parris in 1986? (The theme tune was Nantucket Sleighride by the American band Mountain.)
8 He claimed descent (on his father’s side) from Elizabethan pirates. And he delivered the first ever typewritten manuscript to his publisher, typed on an 1874 Remington. What was the book?
9 She wrote it in 2½ months and pulled herself out of poverty. What was the book? Its central character wrote a book called The Duke’s Daughter, and used the money to pay the butcher’s bill.
10 Tashtego, Fedallah, Daggoo. Who or what are they after?
CLASSICS/ANCIENT WORLD
11 “Every man is a poet when he is in love.” The former Miss Camberg borrowed the title for a late novel. What title?
12 The creation and history of the world in dactylic hexameter, or a plurality of Gregor Samsas? Call pest control!
13 English 1642-51. American 1861-65. Lebanese 1975-90. (And its author didn’t live long enough – 25 – to run away from anything.)
14 Jacques wrote an opera, and Sergei commissioned Maurice to write what he would come to call a “choreographic symphony”. The source material for both predated them by 1,700 years or so. What was it?
15 It’s “the skilled use of blunt objects”. It “offers yesterday’s answers to today’s problems”. It’s “a concentric series of conspiracies in which the last party to conspire emerges victorious”. And it’s a book by a man whose literary style Cicero called “a river of gold”.
16 In Japan, it’s seven. In E20, it’s Victoria Moon. In France, it’s the ninth of 20 and she dies from smallpox. What or who?
17 The censor Nikitenko insisted it have a new title, The Adventures of Chichikov. But the original title prevailed, and Joy Division used it again for a song 138 years later . . .
18 Nine circles, seven terraces, nine spheres. An hour after he finished writing it, he fell ill and died. Writing what?
19 Aged 13 he was River Phoenix, aged 93 he was George Hall. His real forenames are Henry Walton. What’s his nickname?
20 Prince Myshkin?
- Οι γνωρίζοντες καλά την ξένη λογοτεχνία, ας πάνε στις λεπτομέρειες., March 16, 2008]
