Books and Authors Questions and Answers

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.

Answer: B

Cricket - My Style was written by Kapil Dev.

He captained India to the 1983 World Cup, took 434 Test wickets and scored 5,248 Test runs, and remains the only cricketer with more than 400 wickets and 5,000 runs in Tests.

Answer: A

It is Winston Churchill.

The Gathering Storm, published in 1948, is the first volume of his six-volume history of the Second World War, covering the years of appeasement he had opposed. The work contributed to his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

Answer: B

It was Kiran Desai.

The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker in 2006, when she was 35, the youngest woman then to have won it. Her mother Anita Desai had been shortlisted three times without winning.

Answer: B

A Childhood in Malabar was written by Kamala Das.

It is her memoir of growing up in the Nalapat family house in Kerala. She wrote poetry in English and fiction in Malayalam as Madhavikutty, and was among the most candid Indian writers of her generation.