Guardian

A fairly tough puzzle from Araucaria, I thought. Well, I found that filling the grid wasn’t too difficult, but there are a few I can’t explain… The introductory text “A puzzle for today” … Read more >>

A pretty easy puzzle from Auster (who I don’t think we’ve seen for a while), with a lot of rather obvious charades and anagrams. Pleasant enough, but nothing stands out as particularly notable. … Read more >>

Boatman has woven an intricate set of clues around the word flower, which can take on more than one meaning. I found the clues very challenging, taking me nearly an hour to unravel. … Read more >>

Another gentle start to the week from Rufus, with the customary combination of double and cryptic definitions and ingenious anagrams. [If anyone was, like me, shilly-shallying before booking for the ‘Meet the setters … Read more >>

Solving time: 12 minutes If you didn’t solve this puzzle and are confused by the title of this blog, you have probably fallen into the same trap as me. I spent three minutes … Read more >>

Another tour de force from Brendan – a very enjoyable solve, I thought, with too many top quality clues for me to pick out any in particular. (As should be immediately obviously, all … Read more >>

After four days in the wilderness of no internet access -it’s very lonely out there – it’s great to be back in the nick of time to post my scheduled blog – especially … Read more >>

I found this quite hard (as was yesterday’s Brummie), but there were some easy long anagrams to get started with, and some very nice clues, with 20dn being my favourite, closely followed by … Read more >>

One of the events I look forward to every fortnight is the appearance of the latest Private Eye puzzle with its irreverent, risque and outrageous clues. Today, as Brummie, this compiler included some … Read more >>

Morning all. This was largely very straightforward, but took us quite a while as we’re never really on Rufus’ wavelength. Still, there were some enjoyable flashes here, 10ac and 8dn being our picks. … Read more >>

Solving time: 10½ minutes. The two central answers this week combined to yield ‘British resort’ (’15 19′ in several clues), and there were several such hidden in the grid. Usually when there’s a … Read more >>

Bonxie has given us a very entertaining and ingeniously constructed puzzle, in which all the across clues pick up the last word[s] in the preceding one. Some clever clues and nice misdirection. Across … Read more >>

A typically mixed bag from Gordius, with some reasonable clues but a lot of what I think is rather loose wordplay, and not much wit to compensate. Specific niggles listed below..     … Read more >>