| 1) What affliction did Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling have in common? |
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Narcoplepsy
Hay Fever
Tuberculosis
Insomnia
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| 2) Which American author was known for liking to complete drafts in a number 2 pencil? |
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Ernest Hemingway
Mark Twain
Henry James
Edith Wharton
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| 3) Son of a shoemaker, this rather effeminate story-teller never married, although he wore a letter from his childhood sweetheart round his neck until the day he died. He couldn't spell, was dyslexic, and a hypochondriac! Who was he? |
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Hans Christian Andersen
Edgar Allan Poe
Jacob Grimm
Charles Dickens
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| 4) Which of the following writers was the shortest in stature? |
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Alexander Pope
George Bernard Shaw
Oscar Wilde
William Butler Yeats
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| 5) Of whose heroes was Leo Tolstoy complaining when he remarked that they went nowhere but 'from the sofa where they are lying to the closet and back'? |
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Anton Chekhov
Henrik Ibsen
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
His own
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| 6) What do Samuel Richardson, Edward Gibbon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Gustave Flaubert all have in common? |
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All had Welsh mothers
All wrote works that were placed on the papal index of prohibited books
All had six digits on their left hand
All had illegitimate children
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| 7) This author committed suicide, as did his father before him, and as his grand daughter later would. Who was he? |
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Oscar Wilde
Ernest Hemingway
Jack Keroauc
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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| 8) 'The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art'? The words of which heartless writer? |
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Ezra Pound
Charles Dickens
Nathaniel Hawthorne
George Bernard Shaw
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| 9) 'Excuse my dust' was a requested epitaph of which of the following irreverent authors? |
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Mark Twain
Dorothy Parker
Jonathan Swift
Daniel Defoe
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| 10) Who is supposed to have been killed by a falling tortoise? |
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Plato
Aristotle
Aeschylus
Sophocles
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