World Classics and Their Authors: Novels, Plays and Epics

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 A, Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish writer whose tale of an elderly gentleman who reads too many books of chivalry, takes up a lance and rides out with his squire Sancho Panza is regarded as the first modern novel in Europe. Option B is wrong because Dante Alighieri of Italy wrote the Divine Comedy, a long poem describing a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. Option C is wrong because Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, a hundred stories told by young people who have fled a plague. Option D is wrong because Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince, a short treatise on how rulers actually keep power, from which the word machiavellian comes. The four names all belong to the same broad period, which is why they appear together as options.

The correct answer is C, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, poet and dramatist whose Les Miserables follows the convict Jean Valjean through the France of the early nineteenth century, and whose The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made the cathedral of Paris a character in its own right. Option A is wrong because Alexandre Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, historical adventure of a very different temper. Option B is wrong because Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, the study of a provincial doctor's wife that became the model of literary realism. Option D is wrong because Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, early science and adventure fiction. All four are French, so the question is settled by the titles, not by the country.

The correct answer is B, Ernest Hemingway. The short novel tells of an ageing Cuban fisherman who hooks a giant marlin far out at sea and fights to bring it home; Hemingway also wrote A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Option A is wrong because John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, about a farming family driven west by dust and debt. Option C is wrong because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, the novel of wealth and illusion in the nineteen twenties. Option D is wrong for the reason that makes it tempting: Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, also a novel of the sea and a hunt for a great fish, but a century earlier and about a whale and Captain Ahab.

The correct answer is B, George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair. Animal Farm is a short allegory in which farm animals overthrow their owner and the pigs take his place, and Nineteen Eighty-Four gave the language the words Big Brother, thought police and doublethink. Option A is wrong because Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, another famous imagined future but one ruled by comfort and conditioning rather than fear, and the two are the pair most often exchanged. Option C is wrong because William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, about schoolboys stranded on an island who slide into savagery. Option D is wrong because E. M. Forster wrote A Passage to India, set in British India. Remember Orwell for fear and surveillance, Huxley for pleasure and control.

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer whose novel traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the imagined town of Macondo and became the best known work of magical realism; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Option A is wrong because Chinua Achebe of Nigeria wrote Things Fall Apart, on an Igbo community meeting colonial rule, the most widely read African novel. Option C is wrong because Pablo Neruda of Chile was a poet, honoured for collections such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, not a novelist. Option D is wrong because Paulo Coelho of Brazil wrote The Alchemist, a much later and far simpler fable about a shepherd's journey. All four are writers of the global south, which is how the options are built.