Hardest Literary Quiz

Telegraph treated its readers recently with a very hard but interesting literary quiz. One of the hardest I encountered considering I won the university-wide literature contest when I was in 2nd year and has been beating Jeopardy rivals, virtual or otherwise, when the topic is "Literature." Here are the questions:

1 Which literary character's first words to whom are: "How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive?"

2 Who was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – in 1907, if that helps?

3 What's the only book for children by James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming?

4 Who is the only person to have been both shortlisted for the Booker Prize and to have played a girlfriend of Ken Barlow's in Coronation Street?

5 What did Jane Austen's father do for a living?

6 To which public figure is Austen's Emma dedicated?

7 What was the first novel by E M Forster?

8 What is the title of John Betjeman's blank-verse autobiography?

9 In Wodehouse's name, what do the P and the G stand for?

10 What is Jeeves's first name?

11 Whose first two novels were Hideous Kinky and Peerless Flats?

12 Frederica, Venetia and Black Sheep are among whose Regency romances – a genre she's generally credited with inventing?

13 In which language did Franz Kafka write?

14 Who, in the 1950s, wrote the highly influential food books French Country Cooking and Italian Food?

15 What is the main title of the Bill Bryson book that is subtitled Travels in Europe?

16 What was Thomas Hardy's first profession?

17 In his later years, what was the geographically significant name of Thomas Hardy's dog?

18 Which classic novel of the Second World War begins: "It was love at first sight"?

19 In which war did Lord Byron die?

20 In Homer's Iliad, who kills Hector?

21 Name all five of the Famous Five.

22 Which Enid Blyton character was described in Encounter magazine in 1958 as "the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction"?

23 What kind of animal is Beatrix Potter's Jeremy Fisher?

24 Who is the most famous literary creation of Jean de Brunhoff?

25 What is the only Shakespeare play with an animal in the title?

26 In the novels of John Mortimer, how does Rumpole refer to his wife?

27 Which 19th-century literary character marries Isabella Linton?

28 In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, how many times has the Wife of Bath been married?

29 John le Carré's breakthrough novel was his third, published in 1963. What was it called?

30 Which country is the main setting for le Carré's The Constant Gardener?

31 Name any Iris Murdoch novel with a colour in the title.

32 In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, how is the nightmare totalitarian future reflected in the way beer is served?

33 Who wrote the dramatic monologue, originally for television, A Cream Cracker Under the Settee?

34 A taste of which foodstuff prompted the Proustian rush?

35 What is the third word of the poem To Autumn?

36 In 1819, who became Keats's fiancée?

37 Which Keats poem contains the line, "And no birds sing"?

38 Which phrase was written, at his own request, on Keats's tombstone in Rome?

39 With which novel did Ian McEwan win the 1998 Booker Prize?

40 Which literary novelist wrote the first ever episode of the TV series Upstairs, Downstairs?

41 What's the name of Sherlock Holmes's older and even more brilliant brother?

42 Which 12-novel sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins?

43 Name any book in Philip Roth's original Zuckerman trilogy.

44 Which British Nobel Prize-winner's first novel was The Grass Is Singing?

45 What event of July 1986 was the subject of the poem The Honey Bee and the Thistle by Ted Hughes, the poet laureate at the time?

46 What is the only Shakespeare play whose title contains an English place name?

47 To the nearest thousand, how many direct descendants of Shakespeare are thought to be alive today?

48 Who is the most famous literary creation of the Reverend Wilbert Awdry?

49 What's the first phrase of Virgil's Aeneid (in English or Latin)?

50 What was Alice Sebold's bestselling debut novel?

51 Which of his novels did Dickens say was his favourite?

52 Which Dickens novel has a plot that centres on someone leaving money to his nephew's lover's guardian's brother's youngest daughter?