Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 13

The correct answer is A, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet of Florence whose long poem carries the narrator through hell, purgatory and paradise in three parts, and which helped make the Tuscan dialect into modern Italian. Option B is wrong because Homer, the Greek poet, is credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed many centuries earlier. Option C is wrong although it is the closest trap: Virgil, the Roman poet of the Aeneid, appears inside the Divine Comedy as Dante's guide through the first two realms, so his name is linked to the work without being its author. Option D is wrong because Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, the stories told by pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, in English rather than Italian.

The correct answer is C, Girish Karnad. Girish Karnad wrote Yayati in 1961, his first play, which takes from the Mahabharata the story of the old king who asks his son to trade youth with him, and Tughlaq in 1964, on the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. He wrote in Kannada and translated his own work into English, and his other plays include Hayavadana, Nagamandala and Tale-Danda. He received the Jnanpith Award in 1998 and the Padma Bhushan, and he also worked widely as an actor and film director. A is wrong because Viju Khote was a Hindi film actor. B is wrong because Shreeram Lagoo was a Marathi and Hindi actor and stage director rather than the author of these plays. D is wrong because Mohammed Zahur Khayyam was a music composer. Exam tip: Girish Karnad — Yayati, Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Nagamandala; wrote in Kannada, Jnanpith 1998.

The correct answer is B, Banu Mushtaq. Heart Lamp gathers short stories written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2025; it was the first collection of short stories to take that prize. Option A is wrong, though it is the closest distractor, because Deepa Bhasthi is the translator who carried the stories into English and therefore shares the prize with the author rather than being the author. Option C is wrong because Vaidehi is a senior Kannada writer of short fiction who did not write this book. Option D is wrong because Sara Aboobacker was a Kannada novelist of an earlier generation, known for Chandragiriya Teeradalli. Papers set this question by placing the translator among the options, so read whether the question asks for the author or the translator.

The correct answer is B, Leo Tolstoy. The Russian novelist set War and Peace against the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, following several families through war and peace alike, and he also wrote Anna Karenina, the other title always paired with his name. Option A is wrong because Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, and the two Russians are the pair examiners most often swap. Option C is wrong because Maxim Gorky wrote the novel Mother, widely read in India in translation, and belongs to a later generation. Option D is wrong because Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago, set during the Russian Revolution and published abroad, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Fix two anchors before the examination: Tolstoy for War and Peace, Dostoevsky for Crime and Punishment.

The correct answer is C, Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novel follows a poor student in St Petersburg who kills a pawnbroker, convinces himself that extraordinary men stand above the law, and is then broken by his own conscience; Dostoevsky also wrote The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Option A is wrong because Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and confusing the two Russians is the commonest error in this chapter. Option B is wrong because Anton Chekhov is remembered chiefly for his short stories and for plays such as The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. Option D is wrong because Maxim Gorky wrote the novel Mother, about a worker's mother drawn into the revolutionary movement, and he belongs to a later generation than the other three.

The correct answer is A, Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract (1762) that the English people are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and are slaves once the election is over. He used the line to attack representative government. For Rousseau sovereignty rested in the general will of the people and could not be handed over to deputies, so only direct democracy counted as real self-rule. The remark is quoted in polity papers as the classic criticism of indirect democracy. Option B is wrong because John Locke defended representative government and the natural rights to life, liberty and property, and his Two Treatises justified the settlement of 1688 in England. Option C is wrong because Plato, in The Republic, wanted rule by philosopher-kings and distrusted democracy altogether. Option D is wrong because Aristotle, in Politics, classified constitutions and called man a political animal, but this saying is not his. Exam tip: Rousseau — The Social Contract, general will, 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains'.

The correct answer is B, Shashi Tharoor. Shashi Tharoor, the writer and parliamentarian, wrote Ambedkar: A Life, a short life of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar; his other recent books include Pride, Prejudice and Punditry, and his earlier works are An Era of Darkness and Why I Am a Hindu. Option A is wrong because Ramachandra Guha wrote India After Gandhi, Gandhi Before India and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World. Option C is wrong because Christophe Jaffrelot is a French political scientist who has written on Indian politics and on Ambedkar as a thinker, but not this title. Option D is wrong because Gopalkrishna Gandhi's books include Of a Certain Age and his writing on Gandhi's associates. Tharoor's titles appear so often in papers that the whole list is worth one line of revision.

The correct answer is D, (A) is true but (B) is false. James Mill did publish A History of British India in 1817 in three volumes, so the first statement is correct. The second is not. Mill did not use the labels Ancient, Medieval and Modern; he split India's past into Hindu, Muslim and British periods, treating the first two as ages of superstition and British rule as the bringer of progress. Historians reject that scheme because it fixes a whole age by the religion of its rulers and hides everything else happening beneath. The Ancient, Medieval and Modern division came later, borrowed from European practice, and it too is criticised. A is wrong because the first statement is true, not false. B is wrong because the second statement is false. C is wrong because only one of the two is false. Exam tip: Mill, 1817, three volumes, and the Hindu, Muslim, British periodisation.

The correct answer is A, Jane Austen, whose novel of the Bennet sisters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy opens with one of the best known first lines in English; she also wrote Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Option B is wrong because Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, the story of a governess at Thornfield Hall. Option C is wrong because Emily Bronte, her sister, wrote Wuthering Heights, the story of Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors; separating the two sisters is a standard examination point. Option D is wrong because Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, in which a student assembles a creature from dead matter and gives it life. All four are English women writers of the same broad period, which is why they are grouped as options.

The correct answer is C, Ritikal. Bihari was a court poet of Jaipur, and his Satsai, praised for holding much meaning in few words, is the most quoted book of the Ritikal, the age of ornament and courtly love that Ramchandra Shukla placed between Samvat 1700 and 1900. Option A, Adikal, is the age of heroic Raso poetry, of Chand Bardai and Jagnik. Option B, Bhaktikal, is the devotional age of Kabir, Jayasi, Tulsidas, Surdas and Meerabai, and candidates place Bihari there because a Satsai sounds devotional. Option D, Adhunik Kal, begins with Bhartendu Harishchandra in the nineteenth century, far later than Bihari. Along with Bihari, hold the other Ritikal names — Keshavdas, Bhushan, Ghananand, Matiram, Dev and Padmakar. A second clue lies in the language: the poetry of the Ritikal is written in Braj, the dialect of the courts, while Tulsidas of the Bhaktikal wrote his Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi.

The correct answer is C, Han Kang. The South Korean writer Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma, and she is known for the novel The Vegetarian. Option A is wrong because Jon Fosse, the Norwegian dramatist and novelist, received the prize for 2023. Option B is wrong because Annie Ernaux of France received it for 2022. Option D is wrong because Abdulrazak Gurnah, born in Zanzibar and settled in Britain, received it for 2021. Because the options in this question are simply the winners of the neighbouring years, the only safe preparation is to learn the year with the name in order: Gurnah, Ernaux, Fosse, Han Kang. Remember also that the literature prize is announced by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.

The correct answer is B, 1954. The Government of India set up the Sahitya Akademi on 12 March 1954 as the national academy for literature, and it works today as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi. Its first President was Jawaharlal Nehru.

Option A, 1947, is the year of Independence and not of the Akademi, though the three national academies for letters, for the performing arts and for the fine arts were all creations of the first decade after it. Option C, 1961, is the year the Jnanpith Award was instituted by a private trust and has nothing to do with the Akademi. Option D, 1972, is too late by nearly two decades. A useful memory hook is that the Sahitya Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi both belong to 1954, while the Sangeet Natak Akademi came a year earlier, in 1953.

The correct answer is B, Homer, the Greek poet to whom both epics are traditionally credited: the Iliad on the anger of Achilles during the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey on the ten year voyage of Odysseus back to Ithaca. Option A is wrong because Virgil was the Roman poet of the Aeneid, which tells of Aeneas leaving the ruins of Troy to found the line that would build Rome, a deliberate answer to Homer but a separate work. Option C is wrong because Sophocles was a Greek dramatist, the author of the tragedies Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Option D is wrong because Aristotle was a philosopher who wrote the Poetics, a study of how tragedy and epic work, not the epics themselves. Keep Greek Homer and Roman Virgil apart in revision.

The correct answer is B, Karl Marx. Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867 as his full critique of the capitalist mode of production, built around surplus value and the exploitation of labour; the later volumes were edited and brought out by Friedrich Engels after Marx died. Option A is wrong because Engels was Marx's lifelong collaborator and co-author of The Communist Manifesto of 1848, but Das Kapital is credited to Marx himself. Option C is wrong because Lenin's own writings, such as Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and The State and Revolution, came half a century later. Option D is wrong because Friedrich Hayek argued on the opposite side in The Road to Serfdom, warning that central planning leads to the loss of liberty.

The correct answer is A, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. Spare is his own account of his life in and away from the British royal family, and the title refers to the old saying about an heir and a spare, the second son. Because it is a memoir, the author is the subject himself. Option B is wrong because Prince William, the elder brother and heir to the throne, has not written such a book. Option C is wrong because King Charles III has written on architecture, farming and the environment, including Harmony, but not this memoir. Option D is wrong because Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, wrote the children's book The Bench, not Spare. This question is a test of one distinction: a memoir belongs to its subject, while a biography belongs to the writer who studied that subject.

The correct answer is A, B. R. Ambedkar. He prepared the text in 1936 as the presidential address for a conference at Lahore, but the organisers withdrew the invitation over its contents, so the speech was never delivered and he published it himself. His other well-known works include The Problem of the Rupee, Who Were the Shudras and The Buddha and His Dhamma.

Option B, Jyotirao Phule, wrote Gulamgiri in the previous century and founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, so he belongs to the earlier phase of the same struggle. Option C, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, led the Self-Respect Movement in the south and is associated with the journal Kudi Arasu. Option D, Narayana Guru, led the reform movement in Kerala with the teaching of one caste, one religion, one God. The undelivered speech of 1936 is the detail that fixes the answer to Ambedkar.

The correct answer is B, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat whose short book advises a ruler on how power is actually gained and kept rather than how it ought to be used; his name gave English the adjective machiavellian. Option A is wrong because Thomas More wrote Utopia, describing an imagined island with an ideal commonwealth, and gave the language that word. Option C is wrong because Plato wrote The Republic, in which the ideal state is governed by philosopher rulers, the opposite approach to Machiavelli's hard realism. Option D is wrong because Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the founding work of classical economics, where the invisible hand of the market appears. Examiners often place Utopia and The Prince in the same question, so hold both pairs together.

The correct answer is B, Walter Isaacson. The American writer Walter Isaacson, who had earlier written the authorised life of Steve Jobs and books on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, published his biography of Elon Musk in 2023 after following him for two years. Option A is wrong, though it is the strongest distractor, because Ashlee Vance wrote an earlier biography of Musk, published in 2015 with a different title. Option C is wrong because Michael Lewis writes on finance and sport, including The Big Short and Moneyball. Option D is wrong because the book is a biography, not a memoir, so it is written by another person and not by Musk. Isaacson's name is worth remembering along with the subjects he has written about, since papers ask the pairing both ways.

The correct answer is A, Maxim Gorky. His novel follows Pelageya Nilovna, the mother of a young factory worker, as she is drawn from fear and obedience into the revolutionary movement of her son; it was translated into many Indian languages and shaped progressive writing here. Option B is wrong because Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both of an earlier generation and of the landed classes rather than the factory. Option C is wrong because Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago, which looks back at the revolution from a later vantage. Option D is wrong because Ivan Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons, on the clash between an older generation and the young nihilists. Gorky, whose pen name means bitter, is the one Russian of the four associated with the workers' movement.

The correct answer is B, Samantha Harvey. Orbital, a short novel that follows six astronauts through a day of orbits around the earth, won the Booker Prize in 2024 for the British writer Samantha Harvey. Option A is wrong because Paul Lynch, from Ireland, won the prize the year before, in 2023, for Prophet Song. Option C is wrong because Shehan Karunatilaka of Sri Lanka won in 2022 for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Option D is wrong because Douglas Stuart won in 2020 for Shuggie Bain. As with the Nobel question, the options are the winners of the nearby years, so revise the Booker list as a chain of year, book and author rather than as separate facts, and keep it apart from the International Booker list. The Booker Prize is open to fiction written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.