Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: C

It is the first Sanskrit film.

G. V. Iyer's Adi Shankaracharya, made in 1983, was the first feature film in Sanskrit and won four National Awards, including Best Film.

Answer: D

It was Mario Puzo.

The Godfather, published in 1969, sold over nine million copies in two years. Puzo then co-wrote the screenplay with Coppola and won Academy Awards for the first two films.

Answer: A

It is a novel.

David Copperfield, published in 1850, was the most autobiographical of Dickens's novels and his own favourite, as he says in the preface. A twentieth-century stage magician later took the name.

Answer: A

It was Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, follows the student Raskolnikov, who kills a pawnbroker to test a theory that extraordinary men stand above the moral law, and is destroyed by what follows.

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: B

It was Mahatma Gandhi.

He wrote Hind Swaraj in Gujarati in 1909, on the voyage from London to South Africa, in ten days and with both hands when one tired. It sets out his critique of modern civilisation and his case for swaraj as self-rule in the moral sense.

Answer: C

The wrong pairing is Midnight's Children – A. Sanderson.

Midnight's Children is by Salman Rushdie and won the Booker in 1981. The other three are correct: Prithviraj Raso by Chand Bardai, Idols by Sunil Gavaskar and Meghaduta by Kalidasa.

Answer: A

It is R. K. Narayan.

Waiting for the Mahatma, published in 1955, sets a love story in Malgudi against Gandhi's visit and the Quit India movement, and is the most directly political of his novels.

Answer: B

It is Benazir Bhutto.

Daughter of the East, published in 1988, is her autobiography, written after her father's execution and her years of detention, and before she became the first woman to head a government in a Muslim-majority country.

Answer: B

It is the Torah.

The Torah is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, ascribed to Moses. The Analects are Confucian, the Tipitaka Buddhist and the Zend Avesta Zoroastrian.