The questions
1 Who was the first living person to appear on Roman coins?
2 Which art historian won the Booker prize in 1984?
3 What is Britain’s last surviving Georgian cloth hall?
4 What did Switzerland begin adding to salt in 1922?
5 Which politician wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail this year?
6 1.618 is the approximate value of what number?
7 Visible loss of contact and bent knees are offences in what sport?
8 What, about 900,000 years old, were found at Happisburgh in Norfolk?
What links:
9 Rizz; AI; authentic; hallucinate?
10 Christine Sinclair and Cristiano Ronaldo?
11 Abbotsford; Bateman’s; Greenway; Max Gate?
12 Celia Birtwell (frequently); Divine; Jacob Rothschild; Barry Humphries?
13 Millennium Falcon; Pumpkin Island, Queensland; Francis Drake’s Sampford Manor?
14 Martin Bell; Harland Sanders; Kirk Stevens; Tom Wolfe?
15 Great; Mollymawk; North Pacific; Sooty?
The answers
1 Julius Caesar.
2 Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac).
3 Piece Hall, Halifax.
4 Iodine.
5 Javier Milei (Argentinian president).
6 Golden ratio.
7 Race walking.
8 Human footprints (and flints etc).
9 Dictionaries’ words of the year: Oxford; Collins; Merriam-Webster; Cambridge.
10 Top international football goal-scorers: 190 for Canada and 128 for Portugal.
11 Writers’ houses: Walter Scott; Rudyard Kipling; Agatha Christie; Thomas Hardy.
12 Portraits painted by David Hockney.
13 Won in bets.
14 Wore white suits: correspondent turned MP; chicken magnate; snooker player; writer.
15 Albatross genera.
• Question 2 was amended on 2 January 2024 to remove possible ambiguity about the intended answer. (The art critic John Berger’s novel G won the prize in 1972.)
