A Selection of Literary Insults Quiz

Answer: Count Leo Tolstoy

As indefensible assertions go this one takes some beating, I reckon. For good measure Tolstoy went on to characterise England's favourite dramatist as "crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless". Apparently Tolstoy was not well when he made these observations.

Answer: A Groats-worth of Witte

The other three options are all quotations from Greene's somewhat bilious attack on the young writer from Stratford. One of his other targets is Christopher Marlowe, who had at this time advanced much further than Shakespeare in his literary art.

Answer: flyting

Though it has never taken off greatly in modern English, there are some feisty examples of "flyting" in the Scots language - the earliest surviving example being "The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie" from the early Renaissance period, a trade-off in extravagant insults between the distinguished courtly "makar" William Dunbar and his contemporary Gaelic-speaking fellow-bard Walter Kennedy. Neither pull any punches.

Let wikipedia continue: "Dunbar characterises Kennedy as speaking a barbarous Highland dialect, as being physically hideous and withered...poor and hungry, and of having intercourse with mares....Kennedy, by contrast, suggests that Dunbar was descended from Beelzebub, is a dwarf, and has no control of his bowel movements (to the point of almost sinking a ship in which he is travelling)". I believe Robert Burns was influenced by this kind of vigorous stuff.

Answer: Lord Hervey

Among the effeminate "Macaronis" and clandestine "Molly Houses" of gay eighteenth-century London, John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, was a handsome and talented politician and writer whose secret homosexual activity was eventually to destroy his reputation. He and Pope regularly traded sophisticated insults; here is Pope in full vituperative flow:

"Satire or Sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?
Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded Wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings,
Whose buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys;
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite.
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray,
As shallow Streams run dimpling all the way...
His Wit all see-saw between "that"and "this",
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis."

Answer: William Wordsworth's "Excursion"

Byron would hardly have rounded on his friend Shelley in such a way, but the Lake Poets were all fair game (even though I would take some convincing that Byron had ever actually read "The Excursion"). In the early pages of "Don Juan", he ridicules Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey for evidently thinking they were the only true poets on earth, concluding his address to them with the couplet "There is a narrowness in such a notion/Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean".

Answer: She would have been gunned down within hours had she ever visited America.

He said all the other things. "Whenever I take up 'Pride and Prejudice' or 'Sense and Sensibility'," Twain also remarked, "I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel". It is rather difficult for Austen admirers to forgive Twain for his ungentlemanly outbursts, but he would probably not have worried overmuch about that.

Answer: G.K.Chesterton

Hardy the novelist has had many detractors over the years. Henry James mocked him as "the good little Thomas Hardy", and I have always enjoyed one rather unfair piece on "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in an old periodical called "The Saturday Review", which claimed that "few people would deny the terrible dreariness of this tale, which, except for a few hours spent with the cows, has not a gleam of sunshine anywhere".

Answer: W.B.Yeats about James Joyce

I believe this was said shortly after the first meeting between the two men in Dublin, when the twenty-year-old Joyce, having established that Yeats was nearly twice his age, remarked sorrowfully, "It is too late. You are too old for me to influence you". A couple of years later, as Joyce prepared to abandon Ireland to its Celtic Twilight and seek his fortune in continental Europe, he composed a very entertaining poem called - satirically - "The Holy Office", in which he attacks the foppish Yeats as the man "who hies him to appease/His giddy dames' frivolities/While they console him when he whinges/With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes".

Only a foolish Englishman would try to take sides here.

Answer: C.P.Snow

Leavis evidently felt that Snow had built up an undeserved reputation as a national sage on the basis of some very bland and unoriginal publications. He probably felt that he needed to raise the temperature of the debate in order to get listened to at all. Still, without wishing to suggest that Leavis was wrong, I think the episode tends to support a remark, made in another context, by the Welsh academic Raymond Williams that "Cambridge University is one of the rudest places on earth".

Answer: Geoffrey Grigson

Grigson, though he could be very charming when he wanted to be, was at other times a great master of controlled invective. To him is attributed the magnificent phrase "those wriggling ponces of the spoken word, the disc-jockeys", and he is said to have cavalierly dismissed poor old J.B.Priestley as "a bumbling baboon of a Bradford novelist".

As a young man, Grigson once had his spectacles knocked off in the Strand by the South African poet Roy Campbell as a reward for having spoken disrespectfully of the fair Edith Sitwell. Much later, as an ailing octogenarian, when asked for a response to Ted Hughes's elevation to the Poet Laureateship he simply snapped, "He can't write. I'd rather have had Larkin any day." Grigson remains a very under-rated poet, I think - perhaps partly owing to his cheerful lifelong habit of making enemies round every corner.