1. Which of these epic romances was not written in prison?

   1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

   2. Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

   3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

2. These three racy narratives were all written in prison. Which was the subject of the first known obscenity case in the US, during which its publisher was accused of trying to "debauch and corrupt" the citizens of Massachusetts?

   1. Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland

   2. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

   3. Justine by the Marquis de Sade

3. Which of these 18th-century writers won public favour with his satirical Hymn to the Pillory, penned while he waited to be pilloried for his dissenting mockery of high-church Tories?

   1. Jonathan Swift

   2. Daniel Defoe

   3. Henry Fielding

4. Which modernist poet wrote of art’s attempts to capture beauty – "So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult" – from prison in the 1940s: "... all that Sandro knew, and Jacopo / and that Velázquez never suspected / lost in the brown meat of Rembrandt /and the raw meat of Rubens and Jordaens"?

   1. William Carlos Williams

   2. TS Eliot

   3. Ezra Pound

5. "Stone Walls do not a Prison make, / Nor Iron bars a Cage; / Mindes innocent and quiet take / That for an Hermitage". Richard Lovelace wrote this hymn to internal resolve while jailed for his involvement in which conflict?

   1. Wars of the Roses (1455-1487)

   2. English Armada campaign (1589)

   3. English civil war (1642-51)

6. Which of these journey narratives was not written in part from inside prison?

   1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

   2. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

   3. The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa

7. Which influential philosophical work was completed in a first world war Allied prison camp, concluding, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

   1. Heidegger’s Being and Time

   2. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

   3. Cassirer’s Language and Myth

8. Which of these historic statements by Martin Luther King was penned while imprisoned in Birmingham jail, Alabama?

   1. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

   2. "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that."

   3. "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

9. Nelson Mandela’s Conversations with Myself is an intimate scrapbook of letters and thoughts written over how many years in prison?

   1. 7

   2. 17

   3. 27

10. "I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain …" To whom did Oscar Wilde address his 1897 letter from Reading Gaol, published as ‘De Profundis’?

    1. His ex-lover Robert Ross

    2. His ex-lover Lord Alfred Douglas

    3. His wife, Constance Wilde

Solutions

1:C, 2:A, 3:B, 4:C, 5:C, 6:A, 7:B, 8:A, 9:C, 10:B

Scores

1. 1 and above.

   Verdict: Terrible! Try again?

2. 5 and above.

   Verdict: Not bad – try again

3. 7 and above.

   Verdict: Impressive. Congratulations!