Thursday news quiz: book bans, bonkbuster authors and a papal visit

Pope Leo XIV has been in the news – where is he going to make his first overseas visit? Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty

Thursday rolls around and brings with it another opportunity for you to test your mettle in our weekly quiz. Have you been paying attention to the news – especially the quirkier bits? Find out here, while also enduring a series of tedious in-jokes, and then post your score in the comments to let us know how you got on. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 218

1. 

   Canterbury cathedral is getting its first female archbishop. Who?

   1. Ella Connelly

   2. Sarah Mullally

   3. Fiona Bellamy

   4. Grace Holloway

2. 

   Pope Leo has announced his first overseas tour. Where is the pontiff heading?

   1. Egypt and Libya

   2. Greece and Cyprus

   3. Turkey and Lebanon

   4. Syldavia and Borduria

3. 

   Amazon Prime has changed promotional images on its streaming video service after people complained it was doing what …

   1. Depicting Sherlock Holmes without his pipe

   2. Depicting Indiana Jones without his whip

   3. Depicting James Bond without his gun

   4. Depicting Ron from Sparks without his moustache

4. 

   Hilariously, the first Thursday quiz after the hiatus asked who France's new prime minister was, and just four weeks later they have already been yeeted through the door marked 'do one'. Which French PM has just quit, giving Emmanuel Macron yet another headache?

   1. Sébastien Lecornu

   2. Gérald Darmanin

   3. François Bayrou

   4. Léon Colbert

5. 

   We lost Jilly Cooper, famous for her 'bonkbuster' romance novels. Which of these two very famous ones came first?

   1. Rivals

   2. Riders

6. 

   Talking of books, PEN America’s Banned in the USA study found what was the most banned book in the 2024-25 school year in the US?

   1. Judy Blume’s Forever

   2. Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange

   3. Stephen King's Carrie

   4. Gary Barlow's Massive Son

7. 

   At the Conservative party conference, the Tories managed to give out a free gift where the word 'Britain' was spelt wrong. What was the gift?

   1. A chocolate bar

   2. A small jar of honey

   3. A branded bottle of water

   4. A very naughty miniature dachshund

8. 

   This is Willow, the official dog of the Guardian Thursday quiz. She wants to know which famous children's character is suing the makers of Spitting Image over their recent apparent depiction of it …

   1. Bagpuss

   2. Andy Pandy

   3. Basil Brush

   4. Paddington

9. 

   This week's guest canine is Frank, who the Thursday quiz met down the pub. What a good boy. He wants to know what good cause Drew Scanlon, the man in the Blinking White Guy gif meme, has used his viral fame to raise funds for

   1. HIV/Aids

   2. Heart disease

   3. Cancer

   4. Multiple sclerosis

10. 

    Seventeen of David Hockney's iPad drawings are to be sold at auction. The drawings are of where?

    1. Padstow

    2. Woldgate

    3. Gosport

    4. Ledbury

11. 

    Who will provide a partial refund to Australia's federal government over a $440,000 report that contained several errors, after admitting it used generative artificial intelligence (pictured) to help produce it?

    1. Deloitte

    2. Accenture

    3. KPMG

    4. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

12. 

    And now our recently introduced regular round, least or most with Liberace's ghost. This week the Thursday quiz imagines the ghost of Liberace would like to know which of these people has the MOST Uefa Champions League winners' medals?

    1. Sergio Ramos

    2. Karim Benzema

    3. Luka Modrić

    4. Kate Bush

13. 

    A boffin (the correct technical term) only found out he'd won the Nobel prize in medicine when his wife switched her phone on after they had been on a digital detox in the western US backcountry. What is his name?

    1. Jed Branscombe

    2. Grant Denshaw

    3. Fred Ramsdell

    4. Bobson Dugnutt

14. 

    Thursday quiz favourite Taylor Swift has a new album out. What is it called?

    1. Confessions of a Romance Novelist

    2. The Life of a Showgirl

    3. The Curriculum of Heartbreak

    4. Exotic Creatures of the Deep

15. 

    And finally … a new regular round! On this day with Brian May! And his badger! This week the Thursday quiz imagines the legendary Queen guitarist wants to know about the Prague astronomical clock. 9 October is generally regarded as the date of the first reference to the existence of the clock. But in which year?

    1. 1210

    2. 1410

    3. 1610

    4. 1810

Solutions

1:B - Mullally, 63, the bishop of London and a former chief nursing officer for England, is now archbishop of Canterbury-designate. She will legally become the archbishop at a ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral in January, 2:C - He will visit Turkey between 27 and 30 November and Lebanon from 30 November until 2 December, 3:C - The weapon had been excised from well-known promotional images, 4:A - He was in power for 27 days, or just over half of a Liz Truss, 5:B - The first of a series loosely known as the Rutshire Chronicles, Riders was published in 1985 and Rivals in 1988. In 2016 she told the Guardian it ought to be called ‘shagbuster’ as 'bonk' was out of date, 6:B - The dystopian classic that spawned a Stanley Kubrick movie and added several words to the English language has faced 23 separate removals, 7:A - Rumours that Liz Truss was involved in the commissioning of the gift could not be confirmed at the time of going to press, nor the suggestion that someone playing 4D chess had done it on purpose to get the slogan about the government all over the media, 8:D - Spitting Image appears to have been depicting the lovable kindhearted but accident-prone Peruvian refugee as a cocaine-snorting bundle of chaos. Obviously, it is the rights holders who are suing, not the actual bear, 9:D - He claims to have raised more than $300,000 since the gif hit the internet, 10:B - He started using the iPad because, at his age, he didn't fancy being outside in the cold at an easel and frankly the Thursday quiz can't blame him, 11:A - Well, that is awkward, 12:C - He has won six of the things!, 13:C - Ramsdell and his wife, Laura O’Neill, had been heading back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something on their car, and she switched on her mobile and saw the dozens of congratulatory messages, presumably mostly from other boffins (the correct technical term), 14:B - The album release came equipped with a cinema outing for the official 'release party' that was basically 90 minutes of lyric videos plus some behind-the-scenes footage, 15:B - The historical records are all a bit shrouded in timey-wimey mist, but 9 October 1410 is now regarded as the first mention of the clock in any documents, beautiful thing that it is

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   We hope you had fun – let us know how you got on in the comments

If you really do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers – and can show your working and are absolutely 100% positive you aren’t attempting to factcheck a joke – you can complain about it in the comments below. Why not watch Honey, Do You See Me? by EERA instead?

Honey, Do You See Me? by EERA