Test your literary knowledge with a fiendish set of questions from our panel of writers including Iain Banks, Jilly Cooper, David Hare, Nick Hornby, Lorrie Moore and Will Self.
Readers with the highest scores will go into a draw for a set of five of the most nominated Books of the Year. Please send your answers to books.competition@guardian.co.uk before midnight this Friday, 17 December, as the answers will be printed in Saturday's Review. For the full terms and conditions, click here
Iain Banks
1 "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method." So begins Chapter 82 of which novel?
2 In Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, identical copies of which book provide the code Wormold uses to communicate with his bosses in the British secret service?
3 Which AI is also known as The One Who Walked the Skylines of Dusk with Debris Held Aloft Above his Head, and in which novel, by whom?
John Banville
1 Who was the shadow of the waxwing slain?
2 What is the paltry nude starting on?
3 Where did Caligula encounter the Czar?
Mary Beard
1 A "new" poem of which "Greek Muse" was found in 2004, written on the scrap paper packed into an Egyptian mummy ? complaining about the onset of middle age, and of knees too stiff to dance?
2 A politician who fell foul of the Emperor Augustus and killed himself ? and one of the most famous poets of the 1st century BC. His only poem to survive (celebrating Julius Caesar) was discovered on an Egyptian rubbish dump in 1978. Who is he?
3 2010 saw the first publication of a lost essay by one of the most famous ancient doctors. "On the avoidance of pain" was about the loss of his books in a fire in 192AD and it turned up on a manuscript in a library in Thessaloniki. Who was the author?
Jilly Cooper
1 What is the name of the brave horse who galloped the good news all the way from Ghent to Aix in Robert Browning's poem?
2 In Matthew Arnold's epic poem "Sohrab and Rustum", what was the name of Rustum's horse, who cried real tears when his master's son was slain?
3 Who was the donkey who carried Robert Louis Stevenson on his Travels with a Donkey in the C�vennes?
Helen Dunmore
1 Which composer connects Henry James and George Crabbe?
2 Which hero of a bestselling novel composes the opera Breakfast with the Borgias?
3 Which composer's stay in the Balearics was not an idyll of sun and sand, and who wrote about it?
Geoff Dyer
To which writers do the following quotations refer?
1 "A second-rate writer and a Willy wet-leg."
2 "The enemy of all mankind, you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not the hatred of falsehood which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. It is a perverted, mental blood-lust . . ."
3 "Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness ? what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!"
Antonia Fraser
1 What is the un-English connection between John Milton and Andrew Marvell?
2 What is the connection between Willa Cather, the Queen of France and the Emperor Claudius?
3 Which is the odd one out: Edward, Scott, Burgo or Edward?
David Hare
Here are three great passages from three great plays. Identify play and playwright.
1 "Caviare's good with vodka but it's all down to how you prepare it. A quarter of pressed caviare, two lengths of spring onion, a few drops of olive oil and a squeeze of lemon. Mix them together. The smell alone will drive you insane."
2 "I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten."
3 "We moved in April and we had a little window, and from the tree outside these leaves grew into the window in the most voluptuous, irresistible, sexual way, and Judy and I grew sort of intertwined, getting up each morning just the two of us ? it was a wonderful time."
Nick Hornby
1 Winston Graham, Leon Uris, Arthur La Bern and Victor Canning were the final four novelists to have had what done to their books?
2 Which literary husband and wife wrote the screenplay for Otto Preminger's 1965 film Bunny Lake Is Missing?
3 Which Victorian novelist (and all his novels were published during Victoria's reign) went to the cinema to see a big-screen adaptation of one of his books?
David Kynaston
1 Albert Finney, Vivien Leigh, Claude Chabrol, Hattie Jacques, Philip Roth, Sinead Cusack, Paul McCartney ? what do they have in common?
2 In 1971, 50 leading British models nominated their favourite novelist (living or dead) ? who was the most nominated? (Clue: think zeitgeist.)
3 Philip Larkin, watching an inept boxing match, murmured two words closely associated with a classic Edwardian novel ? what were they?
John Lanchester
1 In Ulysses, the character Buck Mulligan is based on the Dublin doctor and literary figure Oliver St John Gogarty. In what event did Gogarty win a bronze medal at the 1924 Olympics?
2 When Gogarty dived into the River Liffey to escape gunmen in January 1923, he promised to give the river a present if he survived. What was the present?
3 Gogarty wasn't the only Irishman to win a medal at that Olympics: one of the other winners was the brother of a Nobel laureate in literature ? making them the only pair of siblings to share an Olympic medal and a Nobel prize between them. Who were they?
Tom McCarthy
1 Who steals Castafiore's emerald?
2 Who gets Caddy pregnant?
3 Why doesn't Cassandra want a bath?
Lorrie Moore
1 Of the following, who is NOT blonde? a) Sophie in Sophie's Choice; b) Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream; c) Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady; d) �ntonia in My �ntonia; e) Rosedale in The House of Mirth.
2 What prince loses a "brace of kinsmen" and what are the names of these kinsmen?
3 Nabokov's quiz question: what are the names of King Lear's dogs?
Craig Raine
1 Name two operas about real poets.
2 Name two contemporary novels concerned with lack of speed.
3 In what sports did Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus and Howard Jacobson demonstrate their prowess?
Ian Rankin
1 Per Wahl�� and Maj Sj�wall are the progenitors of the current Scandinavian crime fiction boom. But what was the title of their first book featuring Swedish detective Martin Beck?
2 In Jilly Cooper's novel Jump!, what is the name of the horse who steals Etta Bancroft's heart?
3 Which bestselling 2009 novel begins in a bedroom on Edinburgh's Rankeillor Street?
Will Self
1 What two means of contraception do Leopold and Molly Bloom use?
2 The psychotic Septimus Smith is further deranged by a signwriting aeroplane in which novel?
3 Who wrote the feminist utopian novel Herland, published originally in 1915?
Adam Thirlwell
1 What was the real name of JR Ackerley's dog Tulip?
2 What was the name of the dog in Bulgakov's novel Heart of a Dog?
3 Was Karenin, the dog in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, male or female?
Claire Tomalin
1 The present chancellor of the exchequer shares his name with a young man who ended his life, after a night of dancing, lying face down with a bullet through his heart? Where and when?
2 From which famous actress is the prime minister descended, and from which member of the royal family?
3 How many of the 10 pall bearers at the funeral of Thomas Hardy in Westminster Abbey can you name?
Rose Tremain
1 In which novels do the following characters appear? a) Mr Vholes; b) Scholes Destry-Scholes; c) Sally Bowles; d) Mole.
2 In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, when Marianne Dashwood unexpectedly meets the faithless Mr Willoughby at the ball in London, which of the following utterances does she make? a) "Good God, Willoughby!"; b) "Upon my word, Willoughby!"; c) "In God's name, Willoughby!".
3 Which author, when asked how long she took between books, famously replied: "Oh, about half an hour."
Sarah Waters
1 Which fictional characters wrote these imaginary novels? a) Tobias and the Fallen Angel; b) Mr Bailey, Grocer; c) Fields of Amaranth.
2 In which novels do these dogs appear: Evie, Tock, Pilot, Jasper, Mister Mars, the dog of tears.
3 In which poetry collection would you find electric shoes, an enlarged paperclip, and seven little hot dogs?
? The prize is a set of signed copies of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Human Chain by Seamus Heaney, The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor.
Click here for full competition terms and conditions
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