Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were written by:

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 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.