Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The line is Shakespeare's, from Twelfth Night.

Malvolio reads it in the forged letter he believes is from Olivia: 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em.'

Answer: D

The Players of the Past is attributed here to David Candena.

The other names offered belong to Indian writers of quite different kinds - the sociologist M.N. Srinivas, the writer and film-maker K.A. Abbas, and the novelist and journalist Khushwant Singh.

Answer: B

Charles Dickens is the answer recorded here.

He wrote fifteen novels, created some of the best-known characters in English fiction, and was the most popular novelist of his age; his readings drew crowds on both sides of the Atlantic.

Answer: B

India Wins Freedom is the autobiography of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958).

Azad was president of the Indian National Congress during the crucial years 1940–46 and became independent India's first Education Minister. The book records the negotiations leading to Partition; thirty sealed pages were withheld and released only in 1988.

Answer: C

Two Lives was written by Vikram Seth, published in 2005.

It is a memoir of his great-uncle Shanti Seth, an Indian dentist in wartime London, and his German-Jewish wife Henny, whose family died in the camps.

Answer: A

It is Khushwant Singh.

We Indians collects his columns on the national character - its hypocrisies, its noise, its obsession with astrology - written in the manner that made him the most widely read columnist in India.

Answer: B

It is Cricket My Style.

Kapil Dev's book appeared in 1987, four years after he captained India to the World Cup at Lord's. He later wrote the autobiography Straight from the Heart.

Answer: D

Walden (1854) was written by Henry David Thoreau.

It records the two years he spent in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts. His essay Civil Disobedience influenced both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

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: A

It was Rabindranath Tagore.

He wrote Jana Gana Mana in Bengali, and it was first sung at the Calcutta Congress on 27 December 1911. He also wrote Bangladesh's anthem, the only person to have written the anthems of two countries.