Never knowingly undersolved
John This seemed to be a much harder Phi than usual. Once done it all seemed simple enough, as witness the simple parsing of almost all the answers. But in many cases the ‘synonyms’ that we had to find in the wordplay were not at all obvious. All perfectly fair, though.
The difficulty also was exacerbated by the large number of clues that required some sort of subtraction; at a quick count I found seven of them.
This took me ages, although I have no real excuse. Everything was sound so far as I could see; it was simply very hard. It seems that with Scorpion’s crosswords much of the difficulty lies in the fact that there are so many possibilities at each stage.
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Apart from my complete blank with 18dn, and one or two very slight misgivings (27ac, 28ac, 1dn) the clues here are very pleasant and this is one of Eccles’s (you may notice Eccles’s not Eccles) typical good productions. The clues at 9ac and 6dn are very nice.
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That was hard work. Quite apart from the fact that many of the clues referred to a not particularly easy answer and so there was an extra slowness at the start, it was difficult. Or so I thought at the time.
But it was good.
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When is a crossword by Phi anything other than quietly sound? All the clues here admit of quite simple explanations although of course they’re not always all that easy to solve in the first place.
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In a few cases (14ac, 19dn, 25dn, 27dn) Azed has produced clues of the highest quality, clues that would I’m sure be quoted in his own clue-setting competitions, but many of the rest, as is always the case with Azed, are, although perfectly sound and quite pleasant, very simple in their construction and the answers are only difficult to find because they require knowledge of words that are way beyond the ken of the solver on the Clapham omnibus. Which is as it should be. He is not intended to be solved on the C. o.
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Vigo has always been marginally difficult: not horribly so, but significantly. This crossword I found almost as easy as anything the Independent ever produces, and amazingly so for a Tuesday, which is usually one of the harder days. Not that that is a bad thing: it’s a positive on blogging day, and in any case the crossword itself was a good one: simple clues, but all sound and enjoyable. My only carp is with the use (twice, I think) of ‘with’ as a link-word, something that I find almost impossible to justify on logical grounds, although I have seen people who know rather more about these things than I do making a case for it.
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A pleasant gentle crossword from Silvanus today. I thought one or two of the surfaces (10ac, 15ac, …) were perhaps a little underwhelming, but on the other hand some (11ac, 1dn, …) were very good.
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Sorry about the lateness of this post. Also its primitiveness: the nice software that I generally use was for some reason unavailable this morning and I did it the old laborious way, writing … Read more >>
When is Phi anything other than sound and enjoyable? I can never see his devilish Ninas, so perhaps these are less than enjoyable, for me. But not for all.
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Poor old Serpent has got me again, not long after his last appearance. But from my point of view it’s a pleasure: very much on the tricky side but quite fair and a whole lot of very satisfactory clues.
Hypnos and I haven’t met for ages and this pleasant simple crossword shows that he hasn’t lost anything. Nothing much to say really: just a whole lot of sound and very satisfactory clues. The Wednesday standard set by Dac is being maintained.
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A nice comparatively easy Azed today — the last one I did was his P.D. at the start of May, and that took ages. This one didn’t, although it was less fun. But very enjoyable, though. 8dn?
As always I haven’t bothered to explain the difficult words.
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An excellent crossword from Serpent today. It was tough — for me, at any rate — but well worth struggling with, for there were some very good clues and the whole thing hung together nicely. I particularly enjoyed 2dn.
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The usual experience with Phi: clues whose answer is not always obvious, yet after solving one wonders where the problem lay. There are no clues here where I am asking for help in the parsing (which is not to say that all will be perfectly correct. It seldom is).
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