Christmas Quiz

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a little something to test those brain cells, and so here is my round from my book club quiz, from whence I have just returned.

These are first lines from novels. All you have to do is tell me which novel, and who wrote it .... I know there will be great temptation to google, but as an incentive, I can promise a prize to the person with the highest number of right answers. And if you do feel the need to cheat, would you mind saying so - in the spirit of Christmas!

Also, apologies for the total silence - it's been mega busy at work. If anyone wants to know the complete ins and outs of the Oxford interview process, let me know, but I won't go in to details now!

Quiz time!!!!

1). The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

2). All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.

3). It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

4). The Primroses were over.

5). Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

6). Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him.

7). A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness.

8). No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.

9). He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

10). I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

11). It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

12). Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

13). It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

14). The boys, as they talked to the girls from Marica Blaine School, stood on the far side of their bicycles holding the handlebars, which established a protective fence of bicycle between the sexes, and the impression that at any moment the boys were likely to be away.

15). Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.