Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Laghujatakam was not written by Kalidasa - it is an astrological work by Varahamihira.

Kumarasambhavam, Meghadutam and Raghuvamsam are all Kalidasa's, the greatest of the Sanskrit poets, who is usually placed in the Gupta period.

Answer: C

Aristotle said man is a political animal.

The phrase is from the Politics: zoon politikon, an animal of the polis. He meant that human beings realise their nature only in the life of a city-state, and that one who could live outside it would be either a beast or a god.

Answer: D

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) was written by Paul Kennedy.

The book argues that great powers decline when military commitments outrun the economic base that supports them - "imperial overstretch".

Answer: A

Anandamath (1882) was written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

Set against the Sannyasi rebellion in Bengal, the novel contains the song Vande Mataram, later adopted as India's national song. Bankim Chandra is regarded as the first major novelist in Bengali.

Answer: B

It is the Jaya Samhita.

The epic itself says it began as Jaya, of 8,800 verses, grew into the Bharata of 24,000, and reached the Mahabharata of about 100,000 - the longest poem in the world, some seven times the Iliad and Odyssey together.

Answer: A

Kalidasa is called the Indian Shakespeare.

He wrote Abhijnanashakuntalam, Meghadutam and Raghuvamsam, probably in the Gupta period. Goethe's admiration for Shakuntala did much to make Sanskrit literature known in Europe.

Answer: C

It is Paul Kennedy.

The Yale historian published Preparing for the Twenty-First Century in 1993, on population growth, environmental pressure and technological change - a sequel in argument to his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Answer: D

Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own is the biography of Lady Mountbatten, by Janet Morgan.

Edwina Mountbatten was the wife of the last Viceroy and worked extensively in relief during partition. Her friendship with Nehru is the subject of much of the book's interest.

Answer: D

A China Passage was written by John Kenneth Galbraith, published in 1973.

The Harvard economist, who had been American ambassador to India, recorded his visit to China with a delegation of economists just after Nixon's opening to Beijing.

Answer: B

It is The Power and the Glory.

Greene's 1940 novel follows a whisky priest hunted through Tabasco during the Mexican anticlerical persecution. Of Human Bondage is Maugham's, and O Jerusalem is by Lapierre and Collins.