Never knowingly undersolved
John The usual enjoyable crossword from Phi today. It is, one would think, on the easy side for him because so many of the answers can be parsed simply, but I didn’t find it all that easy and failed completely on 2dn.
In a Phi crossword there are seldom clues that really hit you between the eyes, but everything is very pleasant and efficient and it all seems to be sound.
A nice crossword from Hob today. It all fits together well and there is nothing (now that I’ve seen 26dn) that seems to be a problem.
As one always gets from Quixote, an utterly satisfactory, fairly easy but finally tricky, challenge. I went steadily and smoothly through this and then took a long time to finish it off with HABILIMENT, VICE and STELAE my last ones in.
Definitions are underlined.
As usual an expectedly difficult but good crossword from Monk. Most of the answers seemed fairly obvious after the event; it was just that they were so hard to see in the first place. Perhaps this is because of the high proportion of the definitions that are single words, making it hard to isolate them.
One can criticise the grid for a number of reasons, although it is a standard one that is often used by setters: it doesn’t allow for much of a range of answer-lengths (they are all 5, 6, 7 or 8 letters); four of the answers have less than 50% checking, something that I know doesn’t bother everyone but I don’t like it; and very quickly you end up doing a number of separate little puzzles.
As usual Phi has given us a neat efficient crossword with some very nice clues. As I have said before, he is often a bit tricky to get started on and then when you look back afterwards it all seems so simple, as witness the large number of answers that have been parsed in just one term, and I don’t think that’s because I’m in a bit of a hurry to complete this since I have a message from Norton telling me that they must fix a threat which is high risk, and the whole thing may explode before the blog is completed.
It seems that Azed gives us one of these specials, or something like it, every two or three years, and very enjoyable it is. Although, as he says himself in his preamble, ‘The … Read more >>
The usual very nice workout from Raich; not really demanding, but enough to cause someone like me to stop and think from time to time. I had no quibbles with any of the clues: they all seemed to be sound and some of them, like (and here I look through the clues to find ones to quote and nothing really stands out either positively or negatively, but perhaps) 6dn and 7dn were good.
I wish setting clues were as easy as Dac makes it seem. Apparently every word just conveniently happens to have a simple way of being broken up to make a convincing surface, although it’s probably more a case of ars est celare artem.
Definitions underlined.
A gentle one from Tees today; gentle at any rate compared with some of the problems he sets. All seemed to fit in quite pleasantly and straightforwardly, although I had some doubts about 8dn until I realised that a train service was transport, and I had to look up 15dn to learn that an impromptu is a speech.
Definitions in italics.
The usual very pleasing crossword from Phi, which I found a bit harder than usual, although as always everything was perfectly obvious after I had finished.
The Independent has changed things on its website and — for the time being at least, and probably for much longer — I have to use a more primitive method of blogging, which … Read more >>
Dac tends to be gentle, but this was an easy one. There seemed to be no difficult clues today.
Still up to the usual standard, though. As always plenty of lovely surfaces.
Definitions in italics.
After the complications of the milestone crossword last week Azed returns to something more straightforward. His grids are really outstanding: nearly every time he has words that straddle the grid — in this case four of them — and that must be hard enough before he even starts to fit in the shorter words. And he does it all by hand, which is quite amazing.
Definitions in italics.
This was extraordinarily hard. In several places I’m not really sure what is happening and it seems to me that Donk has been less than accurate, but he has in the past produced quite excellent crosswords; perhaps he has done so this time: it may just be going over my head.
Phi’s usual nice crossword. He is good at making a clue not all that easy to solve; yet once one has done it and is looking back, it is often quite obvious. I found nothing controversial here, although I nearly elicited a whole lot of responses explaining how 16dn worked.
Definitions in italics.