Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes
Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.
Continue reading...From thorn, seat, shout and stew to Bruno Mars and Bette Midler, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz
1 What, in Spain, is the world’s largest Renaissance building?
2 Which rock group’s name was inspired by a label on a sewing machine?
3 The body produces about 2 million what every second?
4 What is the only non-US team to win baseball’s World Series?
5 Who did Violet Gibson try to assassinate in Rome in 1926?
6 Financially, what rose from £85,000 to £120,000 in December 2025?
7 Which bird can dive to depths of more than 500m?
8 The Sonderbund civil war in 1847 was what country’s last military conflict?
What links:
9 Thorn; seat; shout; stew?
10 Nicole Kidman; Bruno Mars; Bette Midler; Jason Momoa; Barack Obama?
11 Circular orders; rectangular information; triangular warning?
12 Hannah Montana: The Movie; Lara Croft: Tomb Raider; On Golden Pond; Paper Moon?
13 Argentina; Mexico; New Zealand; Qatar; Senegal; Spain?
14 Black; brown; Philippine forest; Polynesian; ricefield?
15 John Flamsteed (1675) and Michele Dougherty (2025)?
In this week’s newsletter: The race to crown a new 007 has become its own long‑running spectacle, turning the search for Bond into an event as big as the films themselves
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Callum Turner’s turn as James Bond lasted at most a couple of weeks. No sooner had he been enshrined as frontrunner to succeed Daniel Craig, than he was nudged from the DB5 driver’s seat by the latest heir apparent, Jacob Elordi, installed as the new bookies’ favourite after his smouldering, highly profitable performance in Wuthering Heights. Smarting somewhere in the background is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who seemed locked in for the job a couple of years ago, enjoying the backing of former 007s Pierce Brosnan and George Lazenby, but now seems to have fallen out of favour. And don’t forget the succession of other dead cert Bonds now banished to the back of the odds market: the long-rumoured likes of Tom Hardy and Idris Elba (both now likely to have aged out of the role); Theo James; James Norton; Josh O’Connor; Harris Dickinson; Bridgerton’s Rége-Jean Page; and approximately 5,000 other predominately British actors who have enjoyed box office success/led a successful TV drama/look good in a tuxedo.
On and on the hunt goes. Five years after Craig’s final outing, one that left absolutely no wriggle room for his return, and not far off a year since Denis Villeneuve was pegged as director of the next, still-untitled instalment, the next 007 has still not been found. Or if he has (and it seems certain to be a he), everyone involved in the Bond operation is keeping characteristically tight-lipped about it.
Continue reading...A cricket match kindled my love affair with the Greek island, inspiring both a literary festival and my new novel
This is not where you would expect an article about one of the Mediterranean’s most beautiful islands to start. It’s the tail end of winter, 2021. Kensal Green Cemetery in west London: the imperial mausolea canted and crumbling, low clouds dissolving into rain. We are still in that strange phase of the pandemic when we are masked, newly aware of our bodies and the space around them. We are here to bury Nikos, a man who for me, for many, was the incarnation of Corfu.
I had spent my 20s trying to find the perfect Greek island, hopping from the well-trodden (Mykonos, Santorini, Cephalonia) to the more obscure (Kythira, Symi, Meganisi). None quite matched the vision I had dreamed into being as a child, when I segued from Robert Graves to Mary Renault, then to Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles. Greece was an idea before it was a place: freedom and deep thought, a constellation of sand, salt and thyme.
Continue reading...Images include Mountbatten-Windsor with Virginia Giuffre, Jeffrey Epstein and an unknown female lying on a floor
Allegations about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Jeffrey Epstein have unfolded over several years – and in several pictures. Here is how they have dripped into the public’s consciousness and kept the pressure on the royal family.
Continue reading...Dr Cox is still electrifying, the original cast’s interactions are a joy to watch, and after a couple of episodes it finds its tone – making it just the comfort TV we need right now
It is possible to believe contradictory things. For instance, I believe TV’s reliance on reviving old shows is a risk-averse, creative regression. On the other hand, I love it. I particularly love it when fictional characters have visibly aged. There’s a broken humanity that you don’t get with flawless, collagen-rich skin. You sense you could talk to them about your sciatica and they’d get it.
I got that feeling with the new series of Scrubs (Disney+, from Thursday 26 February), a show I once mainlined on E4. Scrubs was as comforting as tea and toast. Surprisingly malleable, too. In its bones, it was a coming-of-age workplace bromance between junior doctors JD and Turk, played by then newcomers Zach Braff and Donald Faison. Their chemistry was the show’s anchor, balancing sassy racial harmony with irreverence and heart, as they bore witness to universal human drama. But is it healthy enough to survive resuscitation, more than 15 years after its last episode aired?
Continue reading...A musical number about a woman’s letter to her husband on the second world war frontline unlocked my ability to blub – and made me a happier person
I am sure I must have cried as a child, but by the time I was a teenager it had stopped. It was probably a boarding school thing. Very stiff upper lip. My parents are not the most emotionally available human beings, either. I like to tease them by saying: “I love you.” You can see the panic in their eyes. They will normally say: “All right then, bye.”
My gran died when I was about 18, and I was sad, of course, but in terms of tears there was nothing, no water. I never cried at movies. I didn’t cry on my wedding day, nor at the birth of either of my daughters. It never alarmed me. I actually thought I might have underactive tear glands. Looking back, it was probably all about control.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy says treating these objects as collectors’ items ‘should be looked at in horror’
An antiques auction selling chains linked to the enslavement of African people in Zanzibar has been accused of “profiting from slavery”.
Neck irons dated to the Omani-Arab dominated trade in enslaved people in east Africa, which ended after African resistance and British pressure in the late 19th century, will go on sale this weekend in Scotland.
Continue reading...Het middel ruimt ophopingen van het eiwit bèta-amyloïde in de hersenen op, maar dat heeft nauwelijks effect op het verloop van de ziekte, oordeelde het Zorginstituut. Nare bijwerkingen maken de behandeling extra zwaar.
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