Never knowingly undersolved
John Some very good clues here. I wasn’t sitting in my usual place in peace and quiet when trying to solve this, and made poor progress with it. Only when I came home did it fall, and even then I had to ‘cheat’ once or twice. So it’s difficult, or perhaps it’s just me.
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Excellent crossword as usual from Phi. Some of the clues were very good, and sometimes one didn’t for a long time know where to go.
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One of Punk’s typically excellent crosswords: not easy to solve — particularly while the gateway clue was still a mystery to me — but quite straightforward after the event, as it should be.
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You always get a nice transparent offering from Alchemi. Plenty of good clues here, though nothing I could see that was particularly frightening.
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Very nice crossword from Morph today. Lots of good clues, with convincing surfaces.
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Whatever else? Phi has as always produced a pleasant and well-constructed crossword. As tends to be the case with him, everything is perfectly clear afterwards even though the actual method of solution may not have been obvious. Many of these answers can be explained in one simple expression.
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I enjoyed this crossword by a setter whose crosswords I have never blogged. Previous puzzles seem to have been rather difficult. This one was also on the hard side, but there are some very good clues here and it all just about makes sense after solving.
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An enjoyable crossword from Silvanus today. If I was being really picky I’d say that rather a lot of the clues require you to leave out bits of, or the majority of, words. But really this doesn’t matter. I can just about understand it all (except for 1ac) and so far as I’m concerned that’s what matters.
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Excellent crossword from Morph today. It took me a long time, but that was because it was good and difficult, and the delay was almost entirely the result of my own incompetence. Where I have cast doubt on the setter I shall probably be shown to be wrong. There are lots of very nice clues here.
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This was one of Phi’s hardest, I thought, not helped by several words …
There is a quite well-known setter who never so far as I can see sets a crossword with more than 28 clues in it. Quite sensible in my opinion: he is being paid for setting a crossword and the payment doesn’t go up if there are more clues than normal. Yet this one has 35 clues. What has prompted Knut to be so profligate? Something must be going on that requires this number of clues.
What a difficult puzzle this was. There were lots of clues that I just couldn’t do for a long time, but I hoped to be able to complete the blog to my satisfaction; which I thought was on, but as you will see below just failed.
The less than 50% checking in several of the answers irritated me and justified me in my failure to make faster progress; quite wrong of course. The actual clues were very good and I have no excuse.
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There was a time when Tees always presented a stiff challenge, with various bits of arcane knowledge required. In recent crosswords I have found him much easier. That this is the result of improvement by me I somewhat doubt; it is more likely that Tees has decided to become a bit kinder.
But there has been no diminution of quality. Easy enough his crosswords may be nowadays, but they are still excellent: still tightly-produced clues and the occasional classical reference.
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This was probably on the slightly easier end of the Phi spectrum of difficulty, not that it fell all that comfortably. Apart from one or two slight doubts, indicated below, I found this as usual to be pleasant and accessible.
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Quite a challenge from Knut today, which took a long time and even then I was defeated by 4dn. My guess is that there were a number of details that passed me by.