What Does that Title Come From? Quiz

Answer: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog

Joyce's 1916 novel, 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', is a 'Künstlerroman', or 'artist's novel', following the development of an artist who, like Joyce did himself, leaves Ireland for Europe.

Thomas's use of the jokey title, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog', for his 1940 selection of short stories, must have been referring to Joyce's book, despite his protestations to the contrary.

Answer: William Goldman

Thomas's 'Adventures in the Skin Trade' was an unfinished comic novel about a young man who ran away to London that has been subsequently adapted into a successful stage play.

Goldman's 'Adventures in the Screen Trade' is one of the funniest books ever written about film making, from one of the greatest writers for the movies. The most famous quote from the book is 'Nobody Knows Anything' - about why some movies work and some don't. The section about working on 'The Stepford Wives' is hilarious. He of course wrote 'The Princess Bride' - novel and screenplay.

Answer: Peter Pan

Bainbridge based 'An Awfully Big Adventure' on her experiences working in her hometown theatre, The Liverpool Playhouse. It features a production of 'Peter Pan', and references the line from the play where Peter says: 'To die will be an awfully big adventure.'

The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990 and subsequently made into a movie.

Answer: Macbeth

Bradbury's eerie fantasy novel, where two teenage boys get caught up in a battle between good and evil centred on a travelling carnival, was published in 1962.

For the title, he drew on the witch's line from Macbeth: 'By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.'

Answer: To a Mouse

In Burns's poem 'To a Mouse' he apologises to a mouse for wrecking its nest while ploughing a field. He says: 'The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley [often go awry]'. The other options are all works by the 'Bard of Ayrshire'.

Steinbeck used the quote for his powerful tragic novella of migrant workers in California.

Answer: 'Cosi Fan Tutte' to 'Cosi Fan Tutti'

The fifth in Dibdin's series of eleven novels following policeman Aurelio Zen's travels and travails around Italy, 'Cosi Fan Tutti' is set in Naples. It draws on Mozart and Da Ponte's opera for parts of its plot and its chapter headings.

'Cosi Fan Tutte' translates as 'women are like that', and Dibdin's title changes the sex: 'men are like that'.

Answer: True

Heinlein's title was taken from Exodus 2:22 (King James Version) - 'And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.'

In 'Stranger in a Strange Land', a human raised by Martians comes to the Earth - he has amazing powers and starts up a religion. In a memorable passage he appears as a magician - he actually does the feats for real, but everyone is unimpressed because they think it's a magic act.

Answer: Eyeless in Gaza

Huxley''s title, 'Eyeless in Gaza' comes from 'Samson Agonistes', by John Milton, in which Samson was blinded and forced to work in a mill.

'Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves ... '

The 1936 novel is loosely autobiographical, and told in a non linear way. It deals with disillusion and detachment and the search for meaning to life.

Huxley took his title for 'Brave New World' from 'The Tempest'.

Answer: Walt Whitman

Prouty took the title from Whitman's short poem, 'The Untold Want'.

'The untold want by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.'

'Now Voyager' was the third in Prouty's 'Vale' series of novels. It dealt with the help a psychiatrist gives a woman who has been oppressed by her mother. It was made into a movie starring Bette Davis in 1942.

Answer: The Waste Land

Eliot's 'The Waste Land' contains the following lines:

'I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.'

Waugh's 1934 novel satirises the English middle and upper class, covering a breakdown of a marriage, an expedition to Brazil and a character keeping the protagonist prisoner so that he can be read Dickens.