Pub Quiz July 19: How smart are you? Take our pub quiz
With 10 fun questions, the pub quiz will get your brain cogs working and put your general knowledge skills to the test.
From where Superman is from to who the first person on a stamp was, see how many questions you can guess correctly.
Take last week's quiz now: Pub Quiz July 12: How smart are you? Take our pub quiz
So, if you think you have what it takes to be the pub quiz master, find out now and take our quiz.
If you liked that quiz, you can see how British you are with the UK's citizenship test.
You can even test your Barbie knowledge with our Barbie quiz and find out if you're a Barbie or just Ken.
Now that you've put your brain to the test, you'll want to start revising hard in preparation for the next pub quiz.
Did you get 10/10, or was it a tough round for you?
Keep an eye on the news and get ready for next week's pub quiz.
How well did you do? Let us know in the comments below.
The pub quiz is believed to have originated from a company called Burns and Porter, which would share its quizzes in the 1970s in order to encourage more regular visitors.
The regular pub quizzes saw pub numbers rise from 30 teams a week to a peak of 10,000 teams.
Burns and Porter went on to publish their own line of pub quiz books and would continue to host weekly quizzes.
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New Statesman
41 minutes ago
- New Statesman
David Gentleman's pensées for the novice artist
David Gentleman. Courtesy of Pelican Books Among the 400 or so instructional letters sent by Lord Chesterfield to his illegitimate son in an attempt to school the young man in 'the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman' there is one, dated 1747, that touches on the importance of art. 'I find that you are a tolerably good landscape painter, and can present the several views of Switzerland to the curious,' he wrote, 'I am very glad of it, as it is a proof of some attention.' Attention, the nobleman thought, was the key attribute not just of art but of life itself, since 'the world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description'. Attention is also one of the elements stressed by the artist-designer David Gentleman in his own book of instruction, Lessons for Young Artists. Gentleman's is a more humble endeavour than Chesterfield's and is notable for its simplicity, but he too believes that to understand the world you need to be in it. He is now 95 and this charming, illustrated volume presents a distillation of some the wisdom gained during a near 80-year career. That span has seen him become one of Britain's most ubiquitous though least-known practitioners. On leaving the Royal College of Art in 1953 he set himself against teaching as a way of subsiding being an artist, as many of his peers did, and relied instead on commissions, for whatever was needed and wherever they came from. His first was for a set of wood engravings for a book called What About Wine? and, thanks to his versatility and inventiveness, they have kept coming. He hasn't always warmed to them, and one brief for an American company was, he later learned, for pesticides that had turned out to be poisonous for the farmers who used them. 'I realised that besides finding interesting and well-paid work, it ought to be responsible, too,' he notes. But, as he says in one of the short commentaries that explains each of his artistic nuggets, jobs are a necessity and, faced with a workaday task, 'I just had to get it done.' The reward, he says, was slow accumulation that eventually led to recognition and a reputation. Nevertheless, it was 20 years before he held an exhibition of his work. It helped that Gentleman was not just the son of two painters but was taught at the RCA by John Nash and Edward Bawden. It is a bloodline that links him directly to a group of figures who transformed British art in the first half of the 20th century, Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious among them. In the 1920s and 1930s the RCA was committed to the idea of allying art and design. Its principal, William Rothenstein, was determined to steer the students away from producing 'dreary imitations of Morris designs' and towards work that had a 'more alert spirit'. It was an ethos still prevalent when Gentleman studied there, and this heritage – and spirit – has long been apparent in his work. Indeed, Gentleman confesses that Bawden's influence in particular was in danger of becoming a little too insistent. When he noticed that there were echoes of his teacher cropping up in his own work, he 'consciously tried to avoid them'. This was not to denigrate Bawden but to make sure his own pictures were original rather than an imitation, however reverential. What makes Gentleman a significant figure is both the range and the quality of his work. He has found a form of artistic demotic that, certainly to Britons of a certain age, has a comfortable familiarity that nevertheless sparkles with imagination. Between 1962 and 2000, he created 103 stamps for the Post Office. His designs ranged from British trees, birds and building types to stamps commemorating the Battle of Britain, 50 years of the BBC, and the launch of Concorde. He has designed posters for London Transport and the National Trust and is responsible for a redesign of the Trust's oakleaf and acorn logo. He has created dustjackets for Faber & Faber and the New Penguin Shakespeare series – a staple for innumerable schoolchildren. He is responsible too for the platform murals at Charing Cross Tube Station showing the building of the Eleanor Cross, a 13th century stone monument; the commission came in 1975 with no brief from London Transport other than 'it had to explain how Charing Cross got its name'. He responded with a bande dessinée of 'medieval' wood engravings that were then expanded to life size. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Perhaps his most untypical work was with the placards he designed for the Stop the War Coalition following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Using a typographical 'No' spattered with blood, he took advice from Tony Benn, whom he had first met when the latter served as postmaster general and Gentleman started designing stamps. For good measure, Gentleman was responsible for coming up with the 'Bliar' slogan too. So the guidance here comes from a long-lived and engaged mind. What Gentleman offers is the antidote to swathes of contemporary art-think and -speak. There is no talk in his book about 'meaning' or 'profundity', much less the wilful obfuscation and vapidity of much contemporary and conceptual art. Instead he proffers modest advice that in less authentic hands would be mere cracker-barrel slogans. Start with a pencil, he counsels, and draw quickly and then you'll get the essentials without being distracted by detail; sketch whatever is to hand; embrace the accidents of watercolour; return to motifs in different weathers and times of day; choose unlikely angles; look up. Attention, attention, attention. His pensées may not be worthy of Montesquieu but they are straightforward and have a validity that is applicable beyond the mere making of images: 'Keep your expectations slight'; 'Just get on with it'; 'You don't have to like, or be good at, everything'. And he accompanies these crisp strictures with a generous helping of his own pictures – drawings in pencil, pen and ink, wood engravings and lithographs, commercial designs and fully fledged watercolours, many from his travels. Some are from his patch of Camden Town in London (as in the view of Euston and King's Cross from the Regent's Canal, pictured above) and others are of the unshowy Suffolk countryside around the cottage he has owned for more than 40 years in a village ten miles from the coast. These pictures are invariably endearing, both observant and skilled, and, in his more considered watercolours, full of detail too. Part of their appeal is that they show a man in tune with the craft tradition; his are indisputably hand-eye works. And while David Gentleman must have looked into his soul many times over the years, he is far too good natured and well mannered to bother the viewer with what he has found there. Art, for him, is not knotted self-expression, revelation or provocation: 'We make art because it is interesting,' he says. It is not highfalutin, but it is a better definition than many. Lessons for Young Artists David Gentleman Particular Books, 192pp, £20 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See more: Samuel Pepys's diary of a somebody] Related
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
The trouble with Gillian Anderson
Imagine, for a moment, that a respected middle-aged British male character actor – Jason Isaacs, let's say – had been cast in the lead role of a sex therapist in a popular, Gen Z-focused Netflix series, called something like Love Lessons. Then imagine that Isaacs had become seemingly so obsessed with blurring the lines between himself and his character that he had not only edited a book about men's sexual fantasies, anonymously including one of his own in there, too, but had begun a secondary career appearing on podcasts in which he encouraged men to freely discuss their peccadilloes and penchants, however taboo they might seem. It would, of course, never happen – not even for a man as likeable as Isaacs. Yet something very similar has taken place with his Salt Path and Sex Education co-star Gillian Anderson, a woman who seems to have turned into her Sex Education character Jean Milburn, only with added froideur and grandeur. (Her Instagram profile, where she boasts 3.5 million followers, describes her as 'Actor. Author. Activist. Dog Mum.') When Anderson recently appeared on Davina McCall's podcast Begin Again, the blurb gushed that 'this episode is about giving yourself permission to explore your wildest fantasies, the power of desire and the importance of asking what you truly WANT – not only in the bedroom but in LIFE!' The territory of mum-fluencer of a certain age is hardly unknown, and Anderson cannot be blamed for embracing extra-curricular activities. Her most recent book, 2024's Want, was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and she has segued smoothly into a career that has encompassed television, film and theatre, as well, now, as that of author. (We will draw a tactful veil over the trio of fantasy novels, The Earthend Saga, that she co-authored, or at least put her lucrative name to, between 2014 and 2016.) She is one of the best-known actresses in Britain, thanks to her star-making role in The X Files and her subsequent high profile, and remains a sought-after A-list guest at any party or soirée. So why, then, is Gillian Anderson so difficult to warm to? Most actors try and give an impression of warmth and likeability in press interviews and in public appearances on things like The Graham Norton Show. Even if, privately, they detest everyone around them and consider themselves part of a rarified species, they have been given extensive media training to make themselves seem down-to-earth and accessible. Anderson, however, has gone entirely the other way. If ever she is compelled to appear on a chat show, she wears an air of regal hauteur that suggests that she regards the whole affair as deeply beneath her, and carries this sense of superiority into interviews. Journalists use the words 'frosty' or 'steely' in profiles about her; a polite way of describing someone who clearly has little interest in ingratiating herself with those who she finds beneath her. If Anderson's work was consistently extraordinary, she might be forgiven much of this aloofness. Many of the greatest actors in history could not be described as 'nice', from Marlene Dietrich to Tommy Lee Jones. Anderson would also probably argue that it is a misogynistic canard that she should have to be seen as warm and fuzzy because she is a woman. She might, of course, be right, but the difficulty is that she is a variable screen talent, to say the least. Anderson was indeed magnificent in Terence Davies's little-seen Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth, and gave very fine performances indeed in both the BBC's adaptation of Bleak House and the serial killer drama The Fall, which both made use of her icy beauty and cool intelligence. But she was devastatingly bad as Margaret Thatcher in the fourth series of The Crown, pitching her performance just this side of pantomime in an apparent attempt to convince viewers that she, herself, was nothing like this dreadful woman that she was playing, and that she didn't share an iota of her politics or thoroughly reprehensible views. By the time that Anderson popped up in Sex Education, an enjoyable if silly show that overstayed its welcome, it was clear that she had come to regard herself as a Great British Institution; ironic, really, for a woman born in Chicago and who rose to prominence playing American characters. So it is amusing that her most recent performance may yet turn out to be one of her most controversial. Anderson and Isaacs played Raynor and Moth Winn, the beleaguered protagonists of The Salt Path, in the successful film adaptation of the book, which has since run into trouble after the revelations that Winn had been more than a little economical with the actualité. Ironically, Anderson had already inadvertently conveyed her own misgivings about Winn, saying in an interview that: 'I was surprised at how guarded she was…it was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness.' Or, indeed, a fear that being lifted to another level of recognition altogether would lead to her subsequent exposure by the Observer. Anderson has not commented publicly on the scandal, and it is unlikely that she will be prepared to do so until it is settled one way or the other. Yet were she to break her silence, and admit that she felt annoyed, even betrayed, by the undeniably embarrassing situation, it would be a rare chink in the armour of this ice queen, sex therapist and, it would appear, all-round Renaissance woman. Just a tinge of vulnerability, you cannot help thinking, would make the Magnificent Anderson that bit more human, and therefore likeable. Whether it will ever happen, however, is a mystery worthy of Agent Scully's investigative powers.
Metro
6 hours ago
- Metro
The 20 best Commodore Amiga games to celebrate the 40th anniversary
GameCentral lists the most iconic games ever made for the Amiga home computer, back in its glory days of the 80s and 90s. It may not be much of a household name nowadays, but anyone who grew up gaming in the late 80s knows that, here in the UK, the Commodore Amiga series of home computers was one of the most popular formats of the time. Its success was one of the reasons the belated release of the NES never took off, something which has affected Nintendo's popularity in the UK ever since. However, once the Mega Drive and SNES launched in the early 90s, the Amiga slowly became overshadowed and, eventually, all but forgotten, apart from a mini-console release in 2022. The Amiga celebrates its 40th anniversary on June 23, but because it was only ever really popular in Europe its legacy is a difficult thing to honour, with only the occasional remaster or reboot for any of its games. But nevertheless, here are 20 of its most memorable titles – almost all of which were originally made in the UK. One of the very first games developed by long-running British studio Team17 – who are still going today as an indie publisher – this top-down shooter is heavily inspired by the movie Aliens and remains an all-time favourite amongst Amiga fans. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Its initial success led to a long line of sequels and spin-offs but while it attempted to segue into being a 3D shooter it was never able to compete with new challengers such as Doom. The attempts at a modern reboot never took off either, which currently leaves the franchise in limbo. When you think of cinematic games, your mind probably goes to big budget PlayStation games like God Of War and Uncharted. But in the 90s, that term was being used to describe 2D platformer Another World and its spiritual successor Flashback. While Another World was all style and little substance Flashback, which also appeared on contemporary home consoles, was way ahead of its time in terms of storytelling in an action games and including a relative amount of non-linear gameplay. A remake and a sequel have both been attempted but the original was very much of its time and even its spiritual sequel, 1995's Fade To Black, wasn't a hit, despite being one of the very earliest third person shooters. The Amiga would have been a far less exciting format without British developer Sensible Software, who have no less than three entries in this list. Cannon Fodder is arguably their greatest creation and something completely unique both then and now. It's essentially a top-down squad based action game, controlled by a mouse (all Amigas came with a mouse – it was the joystick you had to buy separately) where squad-mates would drop like flies, to later be memorialised in an in-game cemetery. The game was heavily criticised by the Daily Star for using images of a poppy but while Sensible were clearly goading tabloids into giving them free press, which they got, the game itself is very clearly anti-war and quietly poignant in terms of the fate of its virtual soldiers. When the Amiga first arrived in 1985, 3D polygonal graphics were all but unknown on home consoles, with even the milestone release of 1993's Starwing (aka Star Fox) on the SNES requiring a more expensive cartridge with extra processing power. And yet the Amiga was filled with hugely ambitious 3D games – all made by British developers and including the likes of Cybercon III, Infestation, Starglider, and Damocles. They all ran with horrendously low frame rates but despite that, Frontier still managed to simulate astronomically accurate solar systems and physics. Like many pioneering games on the Amiga, including 2D titles such as Shadow Of The Beast, Frontier wasn't actually much fun but it was always interesting to explore and play around with. And then when you got bored of that you could play the Amiga version of the original Elite, which was a lot more enjoyable. Speaking of hugely ambitious 3D games with terrible frame rates, that are no fun to play, Hunter was essentially GTA 3 but almost 25 years earlier. The story campaign had you trying to assassinate an enemy general but there's also a sandbox mode where you can take on targets in whatever you like, across an archipelago of islands. This involved driving around in a wide range of vehicles, that you could get in and out of at any time, as well as walking, swimming, and fighting on foot. It was horribly difficult but shared similarities with Midwinter and Carrier Command, in that all three games were decades ahead of their time, in terms of sandbox gameplay, and made by British developers that are now all but forgotten by the wider industry. Although Street Fighter 2 didn't appear until 1991 (there were several versions on the Amiga but none of them were very good), one-on-one fighting games weren't an entirely unknown concept before that, not least because the original Street Fighter came out in 1987. That very same year, the sequel to International Karate, by Jimmy White's 'Whirlwind' Snooker creator Archer Maclean, appeared and it's fascinating how different a concept it is, not least because there's actually three people fighting at a time. It'll forever be most famous for the cheat code that lets you drop the fighters' trousers but that doesn't negate the fact that this is probably the best pre-Street Fighter 2 fighting game on any format. Once one of the biggest gaming franchises of the 90s, Lemming sadly fell out of favour, and drifted into obscurity in the ensuing decades, primarily because it's best played with a mouse, which most consoles never had. It's a puzzle game where you have to stop swarms of lemmings falling to their death, as you block off and dig through the landscape to help them. The series was considered important enough to appear on a Royal Mail stamp, although it's now most famous for being an early work by DMA Design – the studio that went on to become Rockstar North. Without the financial success of Lemmings there would never have been a Grand Theft Auto, which is a sobering thought. Although Sony owns the franchise now, after buying original publisher Psygnosis. Rainbow Islands may be an arcade conversion, of one of the many games claiming to be the sequel to Bubble Bobble, but its true home has always been on the Amiga. It's certainly the only place it's ever enjoyed the degree of fame it deserves, thanks to a near perfect port by legendary developer Andrew Braybrook, creator of Uridium and Paradroid (Commodore 64 games which both had sequels on the Amiga). We know what it looks like, but Rainbow Islands is an incredibly nuanced action platformer, that's filled with secrets and enjoys one of the most flexible weapon systems in any 2D game. The rainbows you shoot out are at once projectiles, traps to catch enemies beneath you, and platforms to be traversed. It's a genius concept that cannot be re-released today in its original form because its soundtrack is technically a knock-off of Somewhere over the Rainbow. Arguably the first ever combat flight simulator, this went unnoticed by many even at the time, although it's a wonderfully imaginative evolution of games like Elite, that focuses solely on combat and arrived a full year before Wing Commander. It features a relatively realistic, physics-based control system and surprisingly involved story missions, obviously inspired by the previous year's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Developer Glyn Williams went on to make the Independence War games, which acted as spiritual sequels, but sadly they're almost completely forgotten too. In some ways it's a shame that Sensible Soccer was so successful, because it meant Sensible Software never got around to making other more experimental titles, like Cannon Fodder and Wizkid. An evolution of earlier game MicroProse Soccer, this was a direct rival to the otherwise popular Kick Off series and was very much the EA Sports FC of its day, except with a sense of humour and played from a top-down perspective. It has a spiritual sequel today, in Sociable Soccer by original creator John Hare, that's seen some success, but nothing like Sensi in its heyday. Although the Amiga rarely got the same games released on contemporary consoles, it did get lots of arcade conversations and PC ports. The PC didn't really come into its own as a games format until the mid 90s but there were notable titles before that time, including the original Civilization in 1991. A franchise so successful the most recent sequel came out just this year. The Amiga version was a bit slower, because of the limited processing power, but it worked very well and so did seminal real-time strategy game Dune 2 and UFO: Enemy Unknown – what would later become known as X-COM. Its predecessor Laser Squad was also a cracking turn-based game, even if it still looked like a ZX Spectrum game. Unsurprisingly, top-down racing games are not something you see much of nowadays, even from indie developers, but there were lots on the Amiga, including arcade conversion Ivan 'Ironman' Stewart's Super Off Road and the excellent Skidmarks series. Super Cars 2 is most people's favourite though, not because it does anything particularly original but simply because it does it very well. The inclusion of weapons is relatively unusual though and ensures multiplayer matches are always glorious chaos. It was also essentially a sister series to the equally popular Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge games. This list of games isn't in any particular order but the two frontrunners for our favourite Amiga games of all-time are Rainbow Islands and this: the best game the Bitmap Brothers ever made and still the definitive example of a future sports game. It's basically a hyper violent version of handball crossed with hockey, where you aim to get the ball into the goal by any means necessary, including punching your opponents to the floor and creating score multipliers by throwing it at devices at the side of the arena. A follow-up has been attempted multiple times, with a new one currently in early access from Rebellion but nothing has matched the elegant simplicity of the original… or its amazing theme tune. As much as his reputation has been tarnished nowadays, Peter Molyneux was on fire during the Amiga era, doing all his best work while at now defunct developer Bullfrog, with titles such as Flood and Syndicate. Populous was his most famous game at the time and along with SimCity (which was also available on the Amiga) helped create the now largely abandoned god game genre. It's arguable how much real strategy was involved in the gameplay, but at the time Populus' open-ended nature and isometric graphics were a revelation. The sequel never added any real depth to the concept though and the franchise has been mothballed for almost two decades now. We've already discussed many of the Amiga's most innovative 3D games but arguably the most impressive is Starglider 2. Rather than being a straight shooter, like its predecessor, it is a completely open-ended sci-fi adventure where you can travel anywhere in a solar system, nominally in an attempt to blow up an enemy space station with a special bomb. No one ever bothered with that though and instead spent their time exploring the fascinating 3D worlds that featured no loading screens and flat-shaded (as opposed to wireframe) polygon graphics, as you travelled from outer space, through the atmosphere, and onto a planet's surface. The highlight was undoubtedly listening to the space whales in the atmosphere of the system's gas giant but the whole game was a technical marvel, with many of the team going on to develop Starwing for Nintendo. While the Amiga had plenty of its own exclusives, and many titles shared with rival home computer the Atari ST, much of its portfolio was made up of ports from other formats, whether it be arcades, the PC, or earlier 8-bit computers. Exile is one such game, having first appeared on the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. That means nobody outside the UK has ever heard of it and yet it's a fantastically ambitious action adventure, with completely open-ended gameplay, a realistic physics engine, and clever artificial intelligence. Perhaps if it had had modern style signposting, and a lower difficulty, it might be better known today but the unfortunate truth is that if a game isn't popular in the US or Japan it's rarely ever seen again. Lucasfilm Games were a loyal supporter of the Amiga and while their later point 'n' click adventures had increasing trouble running on the format the original Monkey Island worked perfectly and thanks to the Amiga's excellent sound chip was arguably the definitive version at the time. Still one of the funniest games ever made – which says just as much about its level of competition as it does the game itself – this is both a charming screwball comedy and a graphic adventure whose puzzles are perfectly pitched as difficult but not impossibly illogical. As a bonus, the series is still going today, thanks to the 2022 soft reboot. If this were a list of most underrated Amiga games, The Sentinel would comfortably sit at the top since, even at the time it came out, very few people had ever heard of it. And that's despite it having been released previously on various 8-bit formats. The Sentinel is a remarkably unique stealth game, where you control an immobile robot and must avoid the glare of the titular Sentinel by teleporting from one spot to the other across an abstract 3D landscape. It was the creation of SIr Geoff Crammond, but as good as Stunt Car Racer and Formula One Grand Prix were, it's The Sentinel which stands as his greatest achievement. This is the main reason we semi-resent the existence of Sensible Soccer, as it's the weirdest and most experimental game Sensible Software ever made. It's nominally a sequel to their earlier 2D shooter Wizball, which was also ported to the Amiga, but has almost nothing in common with that in terms of gameplay. More Trending You play as the disembodied head of Wizkid in what could vaguely be described as a mix of Arkanoid and Rainbow Islands, as you knock tiles and other objects onto enemies below you. It's when you rejoin your body that things get really weird though, in what is one of the most thoroughly British video games ever made. No Amiga list would be complete without Worms, which was initially made as part of a programming competition run by the magazine Amiga Format. At heart, it's a pretty simple riff on Artillery games, where you have to judge the trajectory of shells fired from fixed gun emplacements, but here you can move and there's a much wider range of weapons. More importantly, it's filled with very British humour and a fantastic multiplayer mode. The series continues to the current day, although after the failure of battle royale spin-off Worms Rumble the next mainline entry has been reduced to an Apple Arcade exclusive called Worms Across Worlds. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The A500 Mini console review – all 25 Amiga games reviewed from Alien Breed to Speedball 2 MORE: A classic 90s Amiga video game has got an unexpected reboot on Steam MORE: Flashback 2 review – from Amiga classic to modern calamity
