Cineraria's avatarCineraria

Born in 1963, I began with crosswords as a little boy by “helping” my grandfather with the puzzle in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I have done American-style crosswords since I was a teenager, and I enjoy many other types of word puzzles, including cryptograms and acrostics. I cannot remember when I discovered cryptic crosswords. I used to do the Guardian puzzle every day, but being a lawyer by profession does not leave me a lot of time to indulge my deliberate yet desultory solving method. I have been doing the Guardian Prize every Friday and the Azed every Saturday since 2020, and the Genius every month since 2018 (typically succeeding, but admittedly with some DNFs). I was even gratified to be a Genius winner a few years ago. I have learned an awful lot from studying the post-mortems on fifteensquared. As for other interests, I have a large collection of origami books, and I like folding the most complicated models I can find.

Guardian Prize 29,398 by Kite

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Although I filled in this grid rather quickly, I (somewhat paradoxically) assess this set of clues overall as challenging and sophisticated. Nothing too exotic, but on clue after clue, I would write in an answer, then go back to puzzle out how I arrived at that solution. I would be interested to hear others’ experience.

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Financial Times 17,740 by FALCON

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The puzzle opens with this announcement:

Allan Scott, who compiled nearly 400 cryptic crosswords for the FT as Falcon, has died. A regular compiler for several other newspapers, he also set many Polymaths, the FT’s Saturday general knowledge puzzle. His guiding principles were that “the shorter the clue the better” and that in the contest between compiler and solver, “the solver should always win”. He worked right up until last month. This is his penultimate cryptic puzzle.

I for one will certainly miss this setter. This posthumous offering from Falcon displays his usual solid setting style . . . ,

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