Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Guide was not written by Premchand - it is R.K. Narayan's, published in 1958.

Gaban, Godan and Nirmala are all Premchand's. Godan, his last completed novel, is generally regarded as the greatest Hindi novel of the twentieth century.

Answer: B

Zest for Life - La Joie de vivre - was written by Émile Zola, published in 1884.

It is the twelfth novel in his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart sequence, which traces the effects of heredity and environment through one family under the Second Empire.

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: B

The Old Man and the Sea was written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1952.

Santiago, an old Cuban fisherman, catches a great marlin and loses it to sharks on the way home. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was cited when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Answer: A

The Kingdom of God Is Within You was written by Leo Tolstoy, published in 1894.

It sets out his Christian anarchism and doctrine of non-resistance to evil. Gandhi read it in South Africa and called it the book that overwhelmed him and left a lasting impression.

Answer: A

Mahatma Gandhi said it, in his Quit India speech at Gowalia Tank on 8 August 1942.

The same speech contained 'Do or Die'. He and the entire Congress leadership were arrested at dawn the next morning.

Answer: A

Daughter of the East was written by Benazir Bhutto, published in 1988.

It is her autobiography, covering her father's execution, her years in prison and exile, and her return to Pakistan. She became prime minister that year, the first woman to head a Muslim-majority state.

Answer: D

India's Rajiv was produced and directed by Simi Garewal.

The actress turned documentary maker and talk-show host made it after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in 1991, drawing on her long acquaintance with the family.

Answer: C

John Keats wrote 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.

It opens Endymion, published in 1818 when Keats was 22. He died three years later, and the poem was savaged by the reviewers who his friends believed had hastened his end.

Answer: A

Ramcharitmanas was written by Tulsidas, in the sixteenth century.

He retold the Ramayana in Awadhi rather than Sanskrit, so that ordinary people could hear it in their own speech. It is the basis of the Ramlila performances staged across north India.