Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: B

It was Niccolo Machiavelli.

Il Principe, written in 1513 and published after his death, argued that a ruler must be prepared to act against conventional morality when the state requires it. His name became an adjective within a century.

Answer: C

Preparing for the Twenty-First Century was written by Paul Kennedy, published in 1993.

The Yale historian examined population growth, environmental strain and technological change, and asked which societies were equipped to meet them. It followed his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Answer: A

A Bend in the River was written by V.S. Naipaul, published in 1979.

It follows an Indian trader in a town on a great African river in a country resembling Mobutu's Zaire. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Answer: B

It is Aung San Suu Kyi.

Freedom from Fear, a collection of her essays published in 1991 while she was under house arrest, takes its title from the opening essay: it is not power that corrupts but fear.

Answer: C

The Canterbury Tales was written by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Composed in Middle English in the late fourteenth century, it presents stories told by pilgrims travelling to Canterbury. Chaucer is called the father of English poetry.

Answer: B

The Kama Sutra was written by Vatsyayana, probably in the third century.

Only about a fifth of it concerns sexual technique; the rest is a treatise on courtship, marriage, household management and the conduct of a cultivated life.

Answer: C

Agatha Christie was born in 1890.

She wrote 66 detective novels and is the best-selling novelist of all time, with about two billion copies sold. Dickens was born in 1812, Hardy in 1840 and Shakespeare in 1564.

Answer: A

It is Arudra.

Arudra, the pen name of Bhagavatula Sadasiva Sankara Sastry, wrote Koonalamma Padalu in Telugu - short verses in a folk metre, each ending in the refrain addressed to Koonalamma, in the manner of the classical Sumati Satakam.

Answer: D

Savitri is the epic poem by Sri Aurobindo.

Running to nearly 24,000 lines of blank verse, it retells the legend of Savitri and Satyavan from the Mahabharata as an allegory of the soul's conquest of death. He worked on it for over thirty years.

Answer: C

The Kabir Samman is given for excellence in literature, specifically poetry.

Instituted by the Madhya Pradesh government in 1987, it honours a poet writing in any Indian language.