Q 01/05

Which Jane Austen novel opens by calling it 'a truth universally acknowledged' that a rich single man needs a wife?

A) Sense and Sensibility

B) Pride and Prejudice

C) Northanger Abbey

D) Mansfield Park

Answer · why

B) Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice starts with a joke: in Austen's society it was really the unmarried daughters without fortunes who needed a wealthy husband.

Q 02/05

Which seafaring novel opens with its narrator's three-word request, 'Call me Ishmael'?

A) Lord Jim

B) The Sea-Wolf

C) Billy Budd

D) Moby-Dick

Answer · why

D) Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick was a commercial failure and out of print when Herman Melville died in 1891, yet its opening sentence is now among the most famous ever writ...

Q 03/05

Which Charles Dickens novel opens with the words 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'?

A) The Old Curiosity Shop

B) Bleak House

C) A Tale of Two Cities

D) Our Mutual Friend

Answer · why

C) A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities keeps that sentence going for well over a hundred words of paired opposites, from wisdom and foolishness to hope and despair.

Q 04/05

Which fantasy novel's first line was scribbled by an Oxford professor on a blank exam paper?

A) Prince Caspian

B) The Hobbit

C) Watership Down

D) The Princess Bride

Answer · why

B) The Hobbit

The Hobbit began as one sentence about a creature living in a hole, jotted by J. R. R. Tolkien when he found an empty page among the School Certificat...

Q 05/05

Which children's novel, adapted from a 1904 stage play, opens with the line 'All children, except one, grow up'?

A) Pinocchio

B) Mary Poppins

C) Peter Pan

D) Pollyanna

Answer · why

C) Peter Pan

Peter Pan's famous opener was written for the 1911 novel, seven years after the boy who would not grow up first appeared on the London stage.