Do you know your Woolf from your Wilde? Pit your wits against the editors of the Macmillan Classics Library

1. The short story The Chronic Argonauts developed into which dystopian futuristic novel?

2. James Herriot took his pen name from a James Herriot from (a) a 19th century Leeds iron and steel magnate, (b) a Scottish goalkeeper who played for Birmingham City, or (c) his commanding officer in the RAF during the war?

3. Which author is credited with inventing the sleeping bag in his late 20s as he travelled solo through the Cévennes mountains in France, with only a donkey named Modestine for company?

4. Which of these novels is NOT set in Yorkshire? The Secret Garden, It Shouldn’t Happen To A Vet, The Railway Children, The Machine Gunners

5. Which spy novelist and erstwhile supporter of the British empire was executed by the Irish Free State in 1922?

6. Which of these authors was not a political activist associated with left-wing causes? E Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Jack London, Muriel Spark?

7. AE Housman didn’t write the poems of A Shropshire Lad in Shropshire. Where did he write them? London, Cambridge or Worcester?

8. Which author flirted with death many times during his life, famously playing Russian Roulette after a failed love affair?

9. In 1929 Ronald Knox drew up some rules for writing detective fiction. His injunctions included mentioning the criminal in the first five chapters, not revealing the criminal's thoughts, making sure that the detective and his "Watson" revealed all their clues, and not making the detective the criminal. What were these rules called?

10. In the early 20th century three of the “queens of crime” created detectives that were aristocratic, disdaining a life of leisure in order to use their good minds and superior moral sense to solve crime. Who were they and who did they create?

11. At whose funeral in 1928 were pallbearers Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, AE Housman, JM Barrie, Edmund Gosse, the leader of the Opposition, and even the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin?

12. Two important modernist authors were born on in the same year, in 1882, and both died in the same year, in 1941. Who were they?

13. Charles Darwin, Jules Verne, H G Wells: 2hat do the these three Macmillan Collector’s Library authors have in common with Alexander the Great?

14. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann liked the word “quark” so much he named a subatomic particle after it. From which author’s work is the word taken?

15. Who complained that when he was beginning to question the existence of God, he couldn’t appreciate the beauty of nature with the same religious vigour as he had when he was young, comparing the feeling to being “colourblind”?

16. In Gulliver’s Travels, how tall are the Lilliputians?

17. Who used the pen name Flora Fairfield for her early works?

18. Robinson Crusoe’s parents try to persuade him not to set sail, but instead pursue which career?

19. Which author is the great-great-great-grandfather of Pub Landlord Al Murray?

20. Which novel did George Bernard Shaw believe was more seditious than Marx’s Das Kapital?

Answers:

1. HG Wells, The Time Machine

2. b

3. Robert Louis Stevenson

4. The Machine Gunners

5. Erskine Childers

6. Muriel Spark

7. London

8. Graham Greene

9. Solemn Oath of the Detection Club

10. Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh created Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Inspector Alleyn.

11. Thomas Hardy

12. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

13. They all have craters of the moon named after them

14. James Joyce Finnegan’s Wake

15. Charles Darwin

16. Less than six inches

17. Louisa May Alcott

18. The law

19. William Thackeray

20. Great Expectations