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Solving time: An hour before turning to references to fill in the blanks (54ac, 45dn) and correct the mistakes (21dn, 36dn); still unsure about 7dn. This was a tribute to the prolific English … Read more >>

Solving time: 8 mins I found this the most enjoyable Araucaria I’ve done for a good while. The surface readings almost all made good sense and the cryptic indications were much more accurate … Read more >>

Solving time: 6 mins A very entertaining offering from Paul, with a twist: several of the answers were rebuses or ‘dingbats’, where a phrase is represented in a kind of pictorial cryptic fashion, … Read more >>

Solving time: Don’t know (clock stopped while solving), but at least 15 mins by the time I concluded that I didn’t know the word at 13ac; 25ac and 15dn also wrong. I started … Read more >>

Solving time: 12 mins Pasquale is one of the most Ximenean of The Guardian’s setters (i.e. his clues generally make good cryptic sense) which usually means a fast solve. This wasn’t the case … Read more >>

Solving time: 11 mins This was really fun to solve and included six examples of Spoonerisms, where the initial sounds of a two-word phrase are switched. Most of the other clues were straightforward … Read more >>

A gentler offering than usual for Araucaria, I thought, although some familiarity with Shakespeare’s The Tempest helped since several of its characters appeared as clue answers. There may well be further references that … Read more >>

Solving time: Turned to a dictionary for 16dn after 15 mins This puzzle was themed around two men with similar names, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and their … Read more >>

Solving time: 6 mins Unless I’m getting my compilers confused (quite possible) I found this much easier than most Gordius puzzles – there were a couple of straightforward long anagrams which helped early … Read more >>

Solving time: 12 mins Another themed puzzle from Araucaria with lots of references to playing cards, both in clue answers and wordplay. I found this a pleasant enough puzzle with few significant quibbles … Read more >>

Solving time: 16 mins (23ac wrong and another possible mistake at 10/27ac) Similarly to last week’s puzzle, this was very hard until I spotted the theme (a class of creatures like anteaters) and … Read more >>

Solving time: 9 mins This was a puzzle not of four quarters but two halves: I solved very few answers (only six or so) in the first five minutes before spotting the theme … Read more >>

Solving time: 8 mins For Araucaria this was surprisingly straightforward, but that’s probably just as well with a bank holiday special due this week. One of the reasons for the lower-than-average difficulty was … Read more >>

Solving time: 10 mins This was a very cleverly worked theme which took some thought to see, even with only one thematic answer (20ac) unsolved. The nine relevant answers are all surnames of … Read more >>

Solving time: 20 mins, with the majority on 5dn and 19ac The ‘capitally linked’ answers were all stations on the London Underground. As a non-Londoner I wasn’t doing too badly but was ruined … Read more >>