1) Which UK politician was – surprisingly – the first this year to call for refugees from the Syrian conflict to be granted immediate asylum in Britain?
2) And, perhaps just as surprisingly, who were brought indoors at Chicago Zoo to keep them warm after bitter snow swept the eastern US seaboard?
3) The Environment Agency faced fierce and Ratty criticism during the spring floods for sacrificing residents’ safety and wellbeing for those of which small wetland dweller?
4) The official campaign for Scottish independence was found to have been almost entirely financed, perfectly properly, by Chris and Colin Weir. How did they come by all that money?
5) During a January advertising shoot, a professional tonsorial artiste charged $800 to basketball star Kobe Bryant for hairdressing fees. What, apart from basketball stars having possibly too much money, was noteworthy about this?
6) What officially went on sale in Colorado on the first day of the year?
7) Which royal, 15th in the line of succession, sold pictures of her baby, Mia, to Hello!?
8) In March, the prison service was found to be prohibiting what from being sent to prisoners? Perhaps they’d been watching The Shawshank Redemption…
9) In which case did judge Anthony Leonard, QC have to tell the jury: “It is inevitable in a case dealing with this sort of graphic detail that members of the jury want to burst out laughing. Can I ask you to settle down, and remember where you are?”
10) Who is Victor Spirescu, who got a job washing cars in an Aldi near Biggleswade? Who is Meriam Ibrahim, of Sudan? And who is the inscrutable South African Thokozile Masipa?
11) Which event left the Conservative Party in third place for the first time ever in a national poll?
12) Its address is 30 St Mary Axe, City of London, and it was bought by Joseph Safra for more than £700m. What’s it better known as?
13) Why did we say bye-bye to Pom Pom this stormy year?
14) The BBC only warned Jeremy Clarkson, but sacked David Lowe, a Radio Devon presenter for 30 years. With reference to which word?
15) Whose was the most popular Instagram post of 2014? Actually, ever – with 2.4m “likes”.
16) In Yunnan, China, fire destroyed the 300 houses of the Tibetan town of Dukezong in Zhongdian, the name of which had been changed to what to attract lotus-eating tourists?
17) The US National Security Agency was shown to be spying on users of which mobile app?
18) Boko Haram had another murderous year. What does its name translate as? And in Spain a new party, Podemos, arose: what does that translate as? And what, albeit briefly, did Isil stand for?
19) Teesside Crown Court heard that who, briefly famous in 2002 for his watery death but today very much alive, has paid only £121 of a £679,000 proceeds-of-crime order?
20) In February David Cameron shared a presumably delicious, albeit reluctant, lunch of potted shrimps and trout, washed down with two halves of Hook Norton bitter, at the Swan public house in Swinbrook with which beleaguered, unfaithful European leader?
21) The sausage-munching borough of Copeland was found to be the place in England with the most fat people: 76% against a national average of 64. Which county?
22) According to a survey of 274 UK occupations by the Legatum Institute think-tank, members of which profession attain the most satisfaction – and which the least? The clue is in the phrase “drink and the devil”.
23) Penguin India bravely agreed to recall and pulp all remaining copies of a book by Wendy Doniger, an American academic, dealing with which subject?
24) A French court awarded €1 each to five fans who had ridiculously sued a doctor for the “emotional damage” they had ridiculously claimed to suffer after the death of which musician?
25) Which Hollywood actor and director, by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre (sans cigarillo), saved the life of a golf-tournament director who was choking on a piece of cheese?
26) Who did Germany beat 7-1 in the World Cup?
27) Students elected Edward Snowden, leaker of American state secrets, as rector of the university of which city, whose art college also burned down this year ?
28) What won the Oscar for Best Picture, at a ceremony watched by 43m in America?
29) Britain, with Russia and the United States, is a signatory to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. What (roughly) did it guarantee, of huge significance this past year?
30) In Canada, what incentive was offered to people who encouraged sexual intercourse between moose?
31) In April, viewers turned on subtitles in a BBC dramatisation of which Cornwall-set novel in order to make out the dialogue?
32) When and why did Yorkshire turn yellow?
33) The United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain banned which Hollywood film starring Russell Crowe, because it depicts a prophet?
34) Margaret Hodge, chair of the Commons public accounts committee, suggested that who might “show a bit of contrition by giving back his OBE”?
35) A hatch where babies could be abandoned at a welfare home had to be closed after 260 babies were left in 48 days. In which country?
36) To whose baby did David and Victoria Beckham send cashmere travel sets that, ironically given the father’s career, included sound-cancelling earmuffs?
37) Can you annoy the branding managers by failing to identify these three shops from the ollowing clues: a) Great War football; b) a toy penguin, c) Jools Holland?
38) Which A list-actor published what was widely described as the most execrable poetry this century? Entitled My Heart is a Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole, its first stanza ran: “I reared digital moonlight/You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black/Kismetly… ubiquitously crest fallen/Thrown down to strafe your foothills/… I’ll suck the bones pretty.”
39) “It is wonderful for [him] to be able to do what he does so well,” said Vogue’s editor. “It’s been a waste not being able to benefit from his passion…” Who was forgiven by the fashion industry in a return to a high-profile post with Maison Martin Margiela? And which particularly ugly passion, now illegal in France, had got him into trouble in the first place?
40) Which small man’s tall daughter was criticised for having no fewer than three prams for her new baby: a Stokke for £1,148, a Bugaboo for £879 and a Silver Cross Balmoral, customised with Swarovski crystals?
41) Who did Luis Suarez bite during the World Cup? The defender’s nationality will suffice.
42) What was Britain’s entry to Eurovision, and who sang it?
43) What’s going to be different about the new Ghostbusters?
44) A committee in which country called a neighbouring president “a wicked sycophant and traitor, a dirty comfort-woman for the US and despicable prostitute selling off the nation”? For an imaginary bonus point, what was the name of the committee?
45) Which adopted Scot caused the biggest #indyref twitterstorm through a donation to Better Together? And whose emotions got the better of him when he tweeted for a Yes vote: “lets do this!”?
46) Who asked whom, on Newsnight, whether he had called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”? Clue: few surprises here.
47) “Darling, do you know what? Don’t go to university. Start work straight after school, stay at home, save up your deposit — I’ll help you, let’s get you into a flat. And then we can find you a nice boyfriend and you can have a baby by the time you’re 27.” Whose homemade neofeminist words to her putative daughter, in an interview with the Telegraph?
48) Ofsted inspected 21 schools in Birmingham against the background of allegations of attempts of a Muslim takeover, in Operation Trojan Horse. In one, music had been removed from the curriculum. How many, in total, were faith schools?
49) It was announced that a new film of Dad’s Army is to be made. Starring who as, respectively, Captain Mainwaring and Sergeant Wilson? Give yourself a point for either actor.
50) What will be Britain’s newest garden city? Its target of 30,000 homes is set to double its size.
51) Just days after cricketer Phillip Hughes died after being hit by a ball, a similar if relatively unremarked fate befell a man in white at a match in the Israeli city of Ashdod. What position did he hold?
52) Pre-World Cup, a cover of Private Eye featured the English football team arriving in Rio by plane. What eerily prescient speech-bubble was emerging from the pilot’s cockpit?
53) What was the flight number of the aeroplane which occupied an inordinate amount of search-and-rescue efforts, and inconclusive headlines, during the first half of the year?
54) Which “revolutionary” was awarded the Plain English Campaign’s “Gobbledygook Award” for 2014? Here’s a sample of his work: “This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from transvestites.’’
55) Which French clothing law was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights?
56) Adam Mugliston travelled the 1,167 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats in four days, 10 hours and 44 minutes, beating the record of five days, seven hours and 25 minutes. On which form of transport?
57) Zach Brown from Ohio used crowdfunding to make a bowl of potato salad; within five days he had raised $40,000. How much had he originally sought?
58) A man from Turvey, Bedfordshire, withdrew his daughter from school because it would not let her wear which health prophylactic?
59 Which Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist died, aged 90?
60) In Britain, which two UK party leaders resigned?
61) Why did the figure 888,246 first become artistically significant in August?
62) A radiator salesman mistakenly received hundreds of abusive tweets intended for the TV commentator deemed to have made a dismal job of describing England’s opener in the World Cup. What name did they share?
63) Why did the deputy president of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party complain about the Scottie dogs that preceded each team at the opening of the Commonwealth Games?
64) Sir Nicholas Winton travelled to Prague to be honoured for his role in saving 669 children, mostly Jews, from the Nazis. How old is he?
65) Who played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” and died, aged 60?
66) Why did lead Rosetta scientist Matt Taylor’s exuberant joy, on a successful comet landing, turn within a day to tears of shame?
67) The tomb of which prophet was said to have been deliberately destroyed by Islamic State?
68) Lord Bannside died, aged 88. By what name had he been far better known?
69) Pakistan’s Saeed Ajmal was suspended by the International Cricket Council for bowling with his arm bent by more than how many degrees, the legal maximum?
70) There were official complaints about the amount of human excrement being deposited annually on top of Britain’s second highest mountain. What’s it called (the mountain, not the excrement)?
71) Which faith, 25,000 of whose adherents fled into the mountains to escape Isis, believes the world is in the care of Malak Taus, the Peacock Angel?
72) What was the name of the second US journalist shown being beheaded by Islamic State?
73) Which high-street chain went into administration, putting in doubt 5,596 jobs at 720 outlets?
74) Which word did Ed Miliband use no fewer than 51 times, in a speech during which he accidentally forgot the deficit?
75) A hotel in Mogadishu in Somalia installed its entire country’s first-ever what?
Answers
1) Nigel Farage
2) The polar bears
3) Water voles
4) A lottery win of £161m
5) Kobe Bryant is bald. There’s more hair on a basketball
6) Marijuana
7) Zara Tindall
8) Books
9) The indecent-assault trial of Max Clifford. Jurors had been told that his genitals resembled a ‘button mushroom’
10) The first Romanian to arrive at Luton airport looking for work after a lifting of EU restrictions; the woman sentenced to death (and, thankfully, spared) for apostasy; the judge in the Oscar Pistorius trial
11) The spring Euro-elections
12) The Gherkin
13) It was a famous Dorset rock stack, washed away in the January storms
14) ‘Nigger’ – Clarkson said it in an eeny-meeny rhyme, not even broadcast; Lowe was unaware of its existence when he broadcast a 1932 version of ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’. He was paid £95 a week, and thought it would be a ‘nice, safe choice’
15) Kim Kardashian. It was a photograph of her wedding
16) Shangri-La
17) Angry Birds
18) Western Education is Forbidden; We Can; Islamic State of Iraq and Levant
19) John ‘Canoe’ Darwin
20) François Hollande
21) Cumberland
22) Clergymen (most); publicans (least)
23) The Hindus: An Alternative History
24) Michael Jackson
25) Clint Eastwood
26) Brazil
27) Glasgow
28) 12 Years a Slave
29) To ‘respect the independence and existing borders of Ukraine’
30) Tax breaks
31) Jamaica Inn
32) In July, for the Tour de France
33) Noah
34) Gary Barlow
35) China
36) Simon Cowell’s first progeny, Eric
37) Sainsbury’s; John Lewis; Aldi
38) Kristen Stewart
39) John Galliano; antisemitism
40) Bernie Ecclestone’s daughter Tamara
41) Italy defender Giorgio Chiellini
42) Children of the Universe sung by Molly Smitten-Downes
43) All-female cast
44) North Korea’s Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea speaking of South Korea’s Park Geun-Hye
45) JK Rowling; Andy Murray
46) Jeremy Paxman; Silvio Berlusconi
47) Kirstie Allsopp
48) None
49) Toby Jones and Bill Nighy
50) Bicester
51) Umpire
52) ‘Shall I keep the engines running?’
53) MH370
54) Russell Brand
55) The niqab ban
56) Bus
57) $10
58) An Ebola mask
59) Nadine Gordimer
60) Alex Salmond (SNP); and Nick Griffin (BNP)
61) The number of poppies around the Tower of London, to represent the British and Commonwealth servicemen killed in the Great War
62) Phil Neville
63) It was ‘disrespectful’ to Muslims, some of who view dogs as ‘unclean’. In some areas there has been a call for a jihad on dogs
64) 105
65) Raphael Ravenscroft
66) The shirt he was wearing was condemned as sexist. It featured women and guns
67) Jonah
68) Dr Ian Paisley
69) 15 degrees
70) Ben Macdui
71) Yazidi
72) Steven Sotloff
73) Phones4U
74) Together
75) Cash dispenser
