Authors' Dedications Trivia Quiz

Answer: William Shakespeare

The dedication is signed by "T. T." (i.e. the publisher Thomas Thorpe). The identity of Mr W. H., like that of the Dark Lady, has intrigued readers down the centuries. Among the candidates are William Herbert (3rd Earl of Pembroke), to whom the First Folio was dedicated, and Shakespeare's friend and patron Henry Wriothesley (3rd Earl of Southampton), for whom the initials have to be reversed.

Answer: Jane Austen

The Comtesse was Jane's cousin Eliza (née Hancock), who married Jacques Capot, Comte de Feuillide. The Comte, like many of his fellow French aristocrats, was guillotined during the Terror. Eliza subsequently married Jane's brother Henry. The novel, in the epistolary style which was popular in the eighteenth century, is (in Jane's own spelling) "Love and Freindship."

Answer: "The Rights of Man: Part One" by Thomas Paine

In the 1770s Paine's "The Crisis" and "Common Sense" did much to promote the revolutionary cause in America, and he fought under Washington in the Revolutionary War. When "The Rights of Man" was published, Paine made a gift to Washington of fifty copies of Part One and twelve copies of Part Two, and his gift was cordially acknowledged by the President. Later, the men were on much less friendly terms. Paine criticized Washington's and John Jay's foreign policy, which he thought was too conciliatory to the British, and even went so far as to belittle Washington's contribution to the success of the revolution.

Answer: Byron

The dedication to "Don Juan," in seventeen stanzas of Byron's virtuosic ottava rima, is an attack on what Byron sees as Southey's arrogance, mediocrity and above all venality. There are side-swipes at Wordsworth and Coleridge and a contemptuous attack on the foreign policy and character of Lord Castlereagh. Of course, Southey is far from being the only youthful radical to turn conservative in later life; but Byron was not alone in thinking that Southey was primarily motivated by pure self-interest.

Answer: Oscar Wilde

Wilde served two years imprisonment with hard labour at Wandsworth and Reading. During his time at Reading, Charles Thomas Wooldridge was hanged there for the murder of his wife, who had left him for another man. This inspired "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Answer: "Stalky & Co" by Rudyard Kipling

Kipling attended United Services College from 1878 to 1882. It was a recently founded school, intended to prepare its pupils for entry into the Army or Navy rather than the universities. Price, the headmaster, was an old friend of one of Kipling's uncles. "Stalky and Co" centres on the exploits of a trio of boys: the character of Beetle is based on Kipling himself.

Answer: Agatha Christie

The novel is "Murder in Mesopotamia," a Poirot novel in which an archaeologist's wife is murdered while the couple are excavating a site in the Middle East. Agatha Christie was of course the wife of the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, and knew that part of the world well.

Answer: A. E. Housman

In his lifetime Housman published "A Shropshire Lad" (1899) and "Last Poems" (1922). The title of the second collection suggests that he didn't intend to publish any more, but after his death the collection "More Poems" was produced from works that were found in his notebooks. One of these - pretty typical of Housman in style and content - was made to serve as a dedication. Housman was 77 when he died, whereas the lads depicted in his poems often die young - in battle, by their own hand, or on the gallows.

Answer: "The Peter Principle" by Laurence J. Peter

The Principle is "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." After all, since good workers tend to get promoted and the less competent ones stay where they are, the chances are that sooner or later many jobs will be filled by men and women who are not equipped to do them. Like "Parkinson's Law," the book is a humorous look at what seems to be an inescapable fact of life.

Answer: Joy Adamson

Joy Adamson became famous for her book "Born Free", which was made into a film starring Virginia McKenna in 1964. It tells how Mrs Adamson and her husband reared a lion cub and successfully returned it to the wild. The cub, orphaned when George Adamson shot its mother in self-defence, was called Elsa: hence the second half of the dedication. "Oma" is colloquial German for "grandmother": Mrs Adamson was Austrian by birth and spent much of her youth with her grandmother in Vienna.

Many Britons of my generation will also remember her as a regular panellist on the old radio show "Twenty Questions."