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.

Financial Times 17,933 Jumbo by BUCCANEER

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This grid is chock-full of the witty and precise clues that I have come to expect from Buccaneer. I nominate 55A for Clue of the Year. I hope that I have solved and parsed everything satisfactorily.

The grid with the clue previously missing from the online publication appears here: FT 17,933 revised

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S&B 2024 by A. Bailey

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The puzzle may be found here:

https://www.fifteensquared.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Armistice-4Oct10_Redacted.pdf

This puzzle definitely felt like a change of pace for me, with some of the cluing outside the conventions of the puzzles that I normally solve. There were a couple of solutions that I could not parse without the setter’s explanations, which was not so much the fault of the clues as a result of my lack of the requisite GK.

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