Out of the ordinary
1. Canada
2. Leighton Buzzard
3. Death Valley, California
4. Krakatoa
5. Malta
6. Angola
7. Bernie Sanders (with Joe Biden in fifth place)
8. Carlos Ghosn
9. Fifty pence
10. China.
The horse’s mouth
1. The Queen, in a televised message on 5 April
2. Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary
3. John Lewis
4. A 50p
5. Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales
6. President Donald Trump of the United States
7. Joe Biden, of Donald Trump during the televised debate on 22 October
8. Boris Johnson
9. Rebecca Long-Bailey
10. Sir John Bell, the regius professor of medicine at Oxford.
Royal appointments
1. The 75th anniversary of VE Day
2. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex
3. Jerusalem
4. The Duchess of Cornwall
5. A shark
6. The Queen
7. Bradford
8. The Princess Royal, Princess Anne
9. Birkhall, Aberdeenshire
10. June, with Thursday 2 and Friday 3 being holidays, one transferred from May.
Dumb
1. German shepherds
2. Cob
3. Dorgis, dachshund-corgi crosses
4. A black Labrador
5. A cocker spaniel
6. A racing pigeon
7. Marmot
8. Gorilla
9. Dilyn
10. Palmerston
Exits
1. Dame Olivia de Havilland
2. Nicholas Parsons
3. ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare
4. The 7th Marquess of Bath
5. Wilfred De’Ath
6. Roy Kerridge
7. Christo
8. Sir Roger Scruton
9. Millie Small
10. Little Richard.
Let them eat cake
1. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
2. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
3. Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
4. Lady Carbury in The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
5. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
6. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
7. Jackdaw Cake by Norman Lewis
8. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux)
9. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
10. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in