The Times Daily Quiz: Monday May 19, 2025
1 What is the capital city of Poland?
2 Used in Italian cookery, passata sauce is made from sieved what?
3 In which sci-fi TV show did Billie Piper play the companion Rose Tyler?
4 In our solar system, what is the only planet named after a female god?
5 Horatio Nelson lost the sight of his right eye at the 1794 Siege of Calvi on which French island?
6 In 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly solo across which body of water?
7 Which Venetian artist painted St Paul's Cathedral (c 1754)?
8 Which 1985 film starred Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum and Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet?
9 In physics, which subdivision of mechanics deals with objects at rest?
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The Sun
32 minutes ago
- The Sun
PSG vs Inter: Get £50 in free bets with Betfred, plus our 66/1 bet builder tips
PSG and Inter meet in a blockbuster Champions League final on Saturday. To mark the occasion, our team of betting experts has put together a 66/1 Bet Builder for the big game, courtesy of Betfred. And there's more - new customers who sign up with Betfred and place a £10 bet on football will receive £50 in free sports bets. 1 PSG vs Inter Our Bet Builder selections: Desire Doue 2+ shots on target, Hakan Calhanoglu and Alessandro Bastoni to be carded and over 3.5 goals. Here's why we've made those selections... Desire Doue 2+ shots on target: The teenage star has been a revelation this year and would be in conversation for young player of the year, if it weren't for a certain 17-year-old at Barcelona. Registered two assists last time out against Reims. Has 13 shots on target in Champions League, registering at 1.95 per 90 minutes. Could have big part to play. Calhanoglu and Bastoni to be booked: Calhanoglu a huge price for a player booked in every one of last four starts - and five yellows in last seven games. Bastoni tasked with stopping Ousmane Dembele and was booked in last UCL tie with Barca. Over 3.5 goals: The rate at which goals were flying in in Inter's semi final was incredible and no reason they should change style here. Same with PSG, they're better going forward than defensively, highlighted with scoring 10 goals in last three games. Back our 66/1 Bet Builder Remember to gamble responsibly A responsible gambler is someone who: Establishes time and monetary limits before playing Only gambles with money they can afford to lose Never chase their losses Doesn't gamble if they're upset, angry or depressed Gamcare – GambleAware – Read our guide on responsible gambling practices. For help with a gambling problem, call the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133 or go to to be excluded from all UK-regulated gambling websites. *New customers only. Register (excl 05/04/25), deposit with Debit Card, and place first bet £10+ at Evens (2.0)+ on Sports within 7 days to get 3 x £10 in Sports Free Bets & 2 x £10 in Acca Free Bets within 10 hours of settlement. 7-day expiry. Eligibility exclusions & T&Cs Apply. Eligibility & payment exclusions apply. Full T&Cs apply. **Free bet builder Go to the Bet Builder tab within PSG v Inter played on 31/05/25. Launch the Betfred Bet Builder, build your own bet (3/1+) of 4+ legs and add it to the betslip. Pre-built Builders will not apply for this promotion. Place a £10 or greater bet on your chosen selections between 20:00 29/05/25 - 20:00 31/05/25. Get £10 in Free Bets within 24 hours of qualifying bets being settled to use by 05/06/25
Daily Mail
39 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Dive into the best literary fiction out now; GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann, THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann, ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt
Girl, 1983 is available now from the Mail Bookshop GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 272pp) LINN Ullmann comes from impressive stock: she's the daughter of Liv Ullmann and the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, and she wrote beautifully about both in her 2015 memoir Unquiet. She writes more directly about herself in this novelised work of memory, which pivots on an encounter between a 16-year-old girl (a barely disguised Ullmann) and a much older photographer in Paris in 1983. Sex took place, but Ullmann picks at the event like an angry sore, with her inability to remember precisely what happened as much the book's subject as the event itself. A startling, restless, discomforting piece of work that carefully teases apart rigid ideas about experience and truth, predator and victim. THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus £22, 352pp) THE Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, acclaimed for Westfront 1918 (1930) and The Threepenny Opera (1931) has fallen from popular memory, but Daniel Kehlmann mines fascinating territory in this fictionalised biographical portrait of a communist-leaning artist, who found himself cosying up to the Nazis in order to keep his career afloat during the Second World War. Quite how Pabst regarded the propaganda films he produced is a floating question in this hallucinatory novel, which features walk-on parts for Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (and a brilliantly chilling, loosely disguised Goebbels) alongside fictionalised aspects of Pabst's life (including a floundering, excruciatingly awful period in Hollywood). Throughout, Kehlmann sustains a pervading sickly sense of reality sliding perilously close to nightmare, which is quite possibly how the very private, principled Pabst came to regard his own life. ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt (Granta Magazine Editions £12.99, 320pp) 'JEROME didn't want to schedule too much during the day. He had noticed with relief very early on in their relationship that, like him, Tanja felt the strong need to regularly withdraw silently to her laptop.' I chose this quote by opening the book at random, but it sums up pretty well both the style and content of this lauded German novel about the relationship between a Berlin-based writer and a website designer living the painstakingly curated lives of your standard globalised millennial. The toneless deadpan sentences take on a strange comic energy as Randt details the relentless self-absorption of two people who paradoxically appear to have no meaningful inner life at all. Its tough to read, like being forced to stare for hours at an achingly po-faced, self-aware and extended Instagram post – no wonder it's being called a novel to capture the voice of a generation.
The Guardian
44 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘All of us felt like we had touched gold': What It Feels Like for a Girl, the BBC's electric coming-of-age tale
When the BBC was casting its adaptation of Paris Lees's autobiography, What It Feels Like for a Girl, it wasn't the only one wrestling with how to find the right actor to play the lead in a biopic. 'Cher did an interview,' smiles Lees, 'and she said: 'We just can't find somebody that's Cher.' I was like: 'Same, girl. I hear your struggles.' So me and Cher have been going through it.' Sitting next to Lees is the actor they went with, Ellis Howard, who you may remember as the sapling Ivan VI in HBO series Catherine the Great, but who you will never have seen being this luminous. 'In the beginning, we were looking for a trans person,' Lees says. She and Howard are sharing a Zoom screen, and it's not so much that they look similar as that they both look so cinematic, they seem to match – 'But then I just knew, the moment I saw Ellis, that this cheeky, cheeky person could do it.' Lees is known in the public eye via a series of triumphant firsts: the first trans columnist for Vogue, the first trans woman to present on Radio 1, on Channel 4. But her early life was harsh, brutal at times. She was relentlessly bullied at school for being gay, and carried the weight of her father's homophobia, expressed in both formless anger and embarrassment. She became a 'rent boy' when she was 14, but was astonished when she read, in a review of her book in Grazia that she'd been abused. 'Then I thought: 'Hang on a minute. What else would you call that?' It took me a while to realise that was abusive. When people are vulnerable, when they're told they're worthless, that they're almost half a person, you seek validation in the wrong places. It makes me incredibly sad, but it was really important to show my perspective at that time, not my perspective now.' Howard's performance is exquisite: subtle and daring, true to the fact that it would be years before the teenage sex work processed as a violation – and at the time Lees was thrilled about earning all those fivers. 'When you force people into the shadows, don't be surprised when they go fucking dark,' Howard says. 'You've got to silence the part of your brain that goes: 'I am an adult, I am a leftwing progressive.' You've got to go to a place of wonderment and curiosity.' Paris Lees's perspective in the book, which comes across as strongly on the screen, is joyful – this is an incredibly buoyant coming-of-age story, as Howard describes. 'When we were cast, all of us felt like we had touched gold, here. Whether it's our queerness, whether it's our class, whether it's the scars we've been given that make us feel so seen by it, everyone came to give it their all. How often do you get these unicorn projects, that feel so alive? It felt so rare.' Lees gives her adolescent self the pseudonym Byron, and their story opens in 2000, when things were bleak as hell for a gay teenager in a suburban, declining bit of Nottinghamshire. But this is very much not how they felt at the time: 'I definitely had a sense that things are getting better,' says Lees. 'We thought this was the end of history. I had this sense that people were living longer, wages were going up, flights were getting cheaper, they were cloning sheep. It felt like there was going to be more democracy, there was hope, there was a future. We were going to get there with gay rights. I didn't dare to believe we'd get there with the other stuff.' It's beautifully told in the drama, through friendships with divas and ketamine in nightclubs, that to be young in that era may have felt like a train wreck, but didn't feel hopeless. Howard, who was born in 1997, chips in, 'I'm nostalgic for a time I wasn't born in. Listening to P talk about the possibility of Blair and Brown, talk about a time when the NHS functioned, when school ceilings weren't caving in on people's heads, maybe I've doctored that into my brain, but I feel like I can remember a time when progress was possible. Although if I'm honest, my political awareness really began with austerity.' If homophobic bullying was a thing of the past by the 2010s, 'God, no one told my fucking school,' he says. 'No one told Norris Green in Liverpool. I was definitely ostracised. I come from a family of 'aaaah' blokes [impossible to fully convey the meaning, or mad charm of that 'aaaah' - sort of aggro and in-your-face]. I just had this unwavering sense of, I won't be bullied. You're not gonna get me. One of the reasons why I felt so seen by the book, is because this is a kid who was resilient to a mythic level. Your conditions can harden you. That was my experience of school, anyway.' The double-edged nostalgia for that time – post-industrial drudgery leavened by the smell of escape – is particularly poignant to watch now. Nobody in 2000 (trust me on this, I was there) would have predicted that 25 years later, trans people would be openly vilified in the media and drag queens castigated as perverts. It feels as if we inched forward to Scandinavia on LGBTQI+ rights, only to hurtle back to Weimar. Lees says it's more complicated than that. 'It feels like there's been a weird reversal. The public conversation in the media and politics has become very toxic. But think back: when did you ever see somebody working in Boots, that was trans, in the year 2000? When was your GP trans? When were trans people ever allowed to participate in life or society? Nobody had a job; you either had to be a prostitute or you had to not be out.' She breaks off – 'I'm a little bit guarded about this, because it's obviously relevant, but I don't want everything I do to be framed within trans activism. I hate it when people call me a trans activist. I'm not involved in activism now. Obviously, I am trans. I can't escape that. I feel like I could have died, somebody could have shot me, I could have been revived on the operating table, and the headline would still be about being trans.' Both Lees and Howard see What It Feels Like … as being an exploration of the marginalisation of poverty at least as much as it is about trans identity – if not more so. Again, it's complicated: sometimes sex and gender identity cancels out class identity, in the sense that Lees thinks 'being trans has possibly opened doors for me that wouldn't have [otherwise] been opened, to a working-class person'. Other times, the world demands that you pick a lane. 'Often times, as an actor, as a writer, I'm thinking, who am I today? Am I this scrappy working-class kid? Or am I the sensitive queer boy? And those things can't reconcile. To be swallowed in this industry, one has to present oneself in a fixed way. Who gets to live authentically is so determined by your class.' She adds: 'It's a really big part of my identity, just coming from a scarcity mindset. When you grow up and you've got nothing, that has a huge effect on how I live my life, how I think about things, my sense of internal safety and security.' 'Drama is so fucking posh,' Lees continues – not with indignation, almost amused, like she knows she speaks for pretty well everyone but the rest of the world are too polite to mention it. 'I'm just so sick of it. We love all the actors with the posh accents, I get it, but let's just make the space for some other people. It's so boring, the Jane Austenness of it all, the comedy of manners; let's have some real messy stories about real shit that happens. I love that we've got so many working-class actors on this show. The only place working-class people are represented is reality TV. I've had enough of the double-barrelled names. Working-class people are lyrical, we're just not given a voice.' And if it's a rare oversight by the class gatekeepers that this messy, exuberant story got on to TV, it also breaks out of a predictable aesthetic. 'It's so gorgeous to be in a working-class project that is extended beyond the kitchen sink, something that has so much colour and is so visually arresting,' says Howard. 'It has a cinematic feel and scale that is normally only lent to middle-class stories [but is here] given to a working-class story set in the Midlands.' The whole thing has been a white-knuckle ride from the start, Lees says, 'A bit like if they said: 'We're gonna take a picture of you naked. It's going to be displayed in public. But don't worry, we're going to get good people in, you'll have lots of creative control.' Are you ever going to be happy with that picture? This is made out of my core memories.' It has led, however, to Lees's relationship with Howard – part spirit-animal, part younger-self transformed – as well as some other beautiful performances. Both single out Laura Haddock as Byron's mother, who Lees says managed to powerfully channel her mum, without necessarily looking very alike. And the ensemble of fallen divas – endearing, spiky performances from Laquarn Lewis and Hannah Jones, was 'such a headfuck for me', Lees says, as 'there are the actual fallen divas, the real people. Then there are the characters that I created, based on them, in the book. Then there's the TV interpretations, and the actors playing them, who formed their own breakaway group. A lot of what you see on screen, that is just them fucking around.' What It Feels Like for a Girl starts 3 June, 9pm, BBC Three.
