Do you know your Dickens from your Dostoevsky? Pit your wits against the editors of the Macmillan Classics Library, a handpicked series of covetable hardback classics
1. Which children’s author and Bolshevik sympathiser met his future wife when she was working as Leon Trotsky’s personal secretary?
2. Which group still in existence today was set up by Victor Hugo in 1878 with the primary aim of protecting the rights of writers and other artists. The group included such luminaries as Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Longfellow and Alfred Tennyson.
3. The beautiful but weak Eloi and the terrifying Morlocks appear in which dystopian future novel?
4. Which author is credited with creating the “mad professor”, central to the steampunk ethos, with his characters Otto Lidenbrock and Nemo?
5. Under which pen name did James Alfred Wright write his bestselling stories of life as a vet in northern England?
6. Who threw his manuscript into the fire only to have it rescued by a “family fire brigade” including his sister Eileen?
7. Which American writer did not write her first novel until the age of 40, but also wrote books on interior and garden design, travel and reportage from the first World War?
8. Which children’s author’s first book was a “brief treatise” on poultry-keeping?
9. Which author fled to Mexico to avoid being fined after he wrote a hostile review of one of Shirley Temple’s films and was sued by her management?
9a. Fortunately for posterity, he wrote a great novel after his time there. What was it?
10 Which poet was a member of the mystical group The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn?
Answers: 1. Arthur Ransome; 2. Association Litteraire et Artistique Internationale; 3. HG Wells, The Time Machine; 4. Jules Verne; 5. James Herriot; 6. James Joyce; 7. Edith Wharton; 8. L Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz; 9. Graham Greene; 9a. The Power and the Glory; 10. WB Yeats
