Never knowingly undersolved
A medium-difficulty crossword from Azed. There seemed to me to be lots of answers where the parsing involves an anagram, but now I count them it’s not so excessive (25%).
My guess is that anyone who does these crosswords will have a copy of Chambers to hand and so won’t need everything to be spelled out. In the parsing I have confined myself to explaining when the wordplay is not immediately clear.
Definitions in crimson, underlined. Anagrams indicated *(like this) or (like this)*
Not a typical Azed plain this week.
How splendid to blog another Azed.
Bridgesong has the honour of blogging the last Azed monthly competition puzzle. Please take a moment to read his review in the following blog:
This is the first Azed puzzle to appear since the announcement last week of his retirement from the monthly clue-writing competition.
An unusual Christmas competition, in that there is nothing Christmassy about it.
I feel privileged to have received an Azed puzzle for my turn at this blog.
This Observer barred puzzle was published on the first Sunday of November, so under the new arrangements it is set by Azed as a plain competition offering.
A slightly odd grid in that there are the usual straddling 12-letter answers and sixteen 4-letter ones. But this apart we have a perfectly pleasant crossword with many of the usual nice clues. Sometimes Azed has just relied for difficulty on strange words, it being fairly obvious what is happening in the wordplay, but he is also as one would expect clever from time to time.
Definitions underlined, in crimson. Anagrams indicated *(like this) or (like this)*.
An accessible Azed puzzle.
As much as I have enjoyed the fresh challenge of the new Gemelo puzzles, I felt as though I was back on more familiar ground with this Azed.
This is the first Azed competition puzzle for which entries may be submitted electronically from within the UK.
We have a plain Azed puzzle this week. There is no competition and there are no controversial grid entries that I can see.