Never knowingly undersolved
Radian provides the challenge today. Today is the 200th anniversary of the death of Jane Austen. I suspect the Independent may not be the only paper to publish a crossword … Read more >>
The lad Harry Hoskins once again appears on a Monday, with an easy-ish puzzle. Last time out Hoskins set up regular blogger Pierre with a load of ghost theme bird answers, what’s he got for me?
“Only” five cryptic definitions from Rufus today (a couple of them barely qualifying as cryptic), but a lot of anagrams, which made this a very quick solve for me. Thanks to Rufus. … Read more >>
A fine puzzle to start the cruciverbal week from our favourite spice girl. Meaningful surfaces, clear cluing, good variety of clue types and subject matter, all packaged in a Quiptic framework. Brava, Nutmeg. … Read more >>
A little more tricky than your average Everyman if my solving time is anything to go by but I’ve no complaints about that. . . Across 1 Much less room sadly for supplementary … Read more >>
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.
Definitions underlined and in maroon.
Raich can do hard, but his IoS puzzles are generally accessible, and I at least found this one so. Abbreviations cd cryptic definition dd double definition (xxxx)* anagram … Read more >>
Not an easy end to the week……
A wonderfully complex preamble this week. Read once, twice maybe three times? And then start on the clues and hope it all falls into place. The preamble in summary: There are 9 … Read more >>
For some reason it took a while to for us to get momentum in solving this, although looking back I can’t quite see why: everything’s completely fair, and nothing really obscure. As with … Read more >>
If you knew your way around France and its history, you would have found this FT challenge from Gozo easy. Unfortunately, I didnt. 26ac needs work as well.
It was a surprise to see Maskarade’s name today, as he has previously only mostly appeared as a setter of bank holiday specials… … but the reason soon became clear, as the letters … Read more >>
It’s Phi-day again! We have to say that, as a solve, we found this rather ‘vanilla’ – not unenjoyable, but not really very challenging. Phi’s choice of entries for the four-letter words … Read more >>
This is my first outing as a blogger with Dutch, and a most enjoyable experience it was too! I found this to be a medium-difficulty puzzle, with a good few write-ins (mainly anagrams) … Read more >>
Well, this was certainly a puzzle to get your teeth into! Some easy entry clues but then others that required quite a bit of unpicking. My last parse (4dn) didn’t come until I … Read more >>