Jumbo 1273
Apologies for typos in this one - typed up after my leaving lunch. Time for a well earned retirement break.Nothing particularly remarkable in this oneAcross1 FROSTBITTEN - (BONFIRES, T, T, T), where...
View ArticleMephisto 2967 - Paul McKenna
I found this one more tricky than recent Mephistos, and filled in the grid largely from the bottom up. As is typical with Paul McKenna's Mephisto puzzles there is a pun in the top row (this time on...
View ArticleSunday Times 4754 by Jeff Pearce
9:36. Pretty straightforward stuff, this, but I enjoyed it a lot. I can’t entirely put my finger on why but it just flowed very nicely. There’s very little by way of obscurity, although I didn’t know...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 875 by Mara
The last puzzle I blogged was notable for having a grid with a dozen of the answers sporting unchecked initial letters - this time around, there are only four answers with that property, in theory...
View ArticleTimes 26779 - Time to walk, time to run....
Time: 22 minutesMusic: Berlioz, Harold in Italy, Davis/Menuhin/LSO.Despite my good time, I found parts of this puzzle rather inexplicable. Some of the cryptics are very obscure, and give little...
View ArticleTime Quick Cryptic 876 by Tracy
Working through the word play of some clues it seemed that easier ways to get there had been missed in favour of rather more devious ones. Having said this I'm sure biffers will have biffed and moved...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic 26780
49 minutes for this very entertaining puzzle with a good mix of easy and more complicated clues and one or two moderately obscure references.As usual definitions are underlined in bold italics,...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 877 by Orpheus
Mostly smooth sailing, but I suspect one's general interests / willingness to trust the wordplay, will play a large part in the ease of solving. Embarrassingly (for someone keen on biology), it was the...
View ArticleTimes 26781 - food for thought and eye candy?
Another rather off-beat but enjoyable puzzle, I thought, of typical 'midweek' medium difficulty, with no central theme but a good sprinkling of tasty foodie bits and some words to relish. I took me...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic 26780 - July 18, 2017 Let there be, and eventually there was.
My oath, this took me a long time to start with, and not much quicker once I got going. Too much time barking up wrong trees and laboriously working out wordplay so you lucky lot don’t have to. I’m not...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic No 878 by Hurley
A very good puzzle from Hurley, I thought. Of middling difficulty (probably): I would have come in about a minute under my target had there ever existed an artist called "Lision", but it took me up to...
View ArticleTLS Crossword 1182 by Myrtilus - June 30, 2017
I seem to have made a mulligatawny soup of this - the mystery ingredient being an invisible error. I hope someone will spot it. In the top row we have a cracker-worthy (that's a compliment)...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 879 by Izetti
Probably a puzzle that favours the experienced solver, which I guess is stating the obvious, but there are quite a few devices you'll have seen before if you've been doing these things for a while.On...
View ArticleTimes 26,783: My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels
This meticulously clued seems to have been fully worthy of its Friday slot - 8 hours in only 5 results have been under the 20 minute mark (almost 14 for me) and the Crossword SNITCH is reporting a...
View ArticleTimes Saturday 26778 - July 15, 2017. When the cat’s away, the mice will play.
This was great fun, not least because I was watching replays of Wimbleton at the same time. There were several unknowns, but in each case the rest of the clue steered me straight eventually. Cats and...
View ArticleSunday Times 4755 by Dean Mayer
I really enjoyed this puzzle. Whilst I found it slightly easier than some of Dean's offerings, it nonetheless came up with three instances where I had to trust to the wordplay and enter the answer on a...
View ArticleMephisto 2968 - by Don Manley
I found this on the easy side but with one clue not fully parsed - 19A. I surprised myself by knowing both the name of a pop group and of a tennis player from yester-year; the distiller was less of a...
View ArticleTimes Jumbo 1274
Apologies for the slightly late posting of this - I was away from the computer all day yesterday. No really obscure words/phrases this time, and a straightforward solve, I thought.As usual, * indicates...
View ArticleTimes 26785 - blue, coal, crested, long-tailed or great: they're all here
This was a pleasant Mondayish sort of offering, where the main hurdle to overcome for those not possessing the needed history, spelling, memory or Cockney Rhyming Slang skills was the spelling of the...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic 880 by Joker
A very enjoyable 10-minute solve with some excellent surface readings. I don't think there are any difficult words or unusual meanings, just one definition I needed to check after completing the grid...
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