Times Cryptic Jumbo No 1287 - Why do elephants paint their toenails red?
This Jumbo was on the easy side - indeed a lot of the clues would not have been out of place in the Quick Crossword. My time of a bit over 3/4 hour was only that long because I tried to parse...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 947 by Orpheus
Of course, part of me hopes that you all sailed through this without a second thought, but the other part hopes I’m not faced with the humiliation of across-the-board sub-10 minute solves this morning,...
View ArticleTimes 26865 - to wit, to woo, this was fun. But tricky.
I came to this straight after finishing another, easier puzzle and feeling 'warmed up.' However I soon cooled down as my first pass saw only a few clues in the NW corner filled in and many more which...
View ArticleTimes 26866 - things that go 1 across in the night
Solving time : 11:42 for an interesting crossword. There's a few obscurities here, though I think everything is accessible from the wordplay, though one long anagram may not come readily. Several...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic No 948 by Wurm
I see this is Wurm's third outing, the previous two being June and August of this year. June's was deemed quite easy; August's was deemed quite hard. This is decidedly in the latter category, if my...
View ArticleTimes 26,867: Where Angels Fear To Tread
I'm afraid to say I'm going to skimp on my blogly duties today as I'm off to York for Sloggers and Betters tomorrow, and I've still got a Cryptic Jumbo to write up in time for the weekend. This was a...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic No 949 by Izetti
This seemed to me to be at the harder end of the quickie spectrum, but all the more satisfying to complete successfully. I think there is a misprint in 14d and there were a few words which were barely...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic No 26862 - Saturday, 21 October 2017. Straight down the fairway.
This was a fairly straightforward solve, although not very quick. I finished the LHS first, then the top right, and finally made sense of the bottom right. I’m always happy when there’s no weird...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic Jumbo 1289: His Farce From His Elbow
Soooooooo, the idea is to come back to this and decorate it with some witty repartee between now (Friday lunchtime) and tomorrow morning: the flaw in this plan is that I'm off to York on the 4pm train...
View ArticleTimes 26857 - King Arthur, Teste David cum Sibylla?
It is rare for me to say that puzzles on my watch are anything but Mondayesque - even as Tuesday continues to consider its M&A options with regard to Friday - but this offering has at least the...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic Jumbo 1289: His Farce From His Elbow
Soooooooo, the idea is to come back to this and decorate it with some witty repartee between now (Friday lunchtime) and tomorrow morning: the flaw in this plan is that I'm off to York on the 4pm train...
View ArticleSunday Times 4769 by Jeff Pearce
A highly enjoyable and (in overall terms) not particularly taxing offering from Jeff this week, but with (at least for me) a sting in the tail at 11dn which took me an age to rumble.Some lovely clues,...
View ArticleMephisto 2982 - Paul McKenna
A reasonable puzzle with some quirky definitions that I enjoyed – echoes of Ximenes. I’ve one query at 28A where I can’t see the cryptic, not having needed it to solve the clue. Across1 Nick Clegg’s...
View ArticleTimes 26869 - PBs Beckon
If I can finish this in a smidgen above 16 minutes, then I think we may see one or two sub-4 minutes from the usual suspects, not excluding the fellow who took an extraordinary 20 minutes on a puzzle...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic 950 by Tracy
This one took me 7 minutes and I think it's towards the easier end of the spectrum and may suit those who have found recent QCs a little on the hard side. I hope so anyway. Some of the definitions may...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic 951 by Howzat
Although there were a couple of literary/musical references, everything was fairly and amusingly clued. As I’ve gone through writing the blog I’ve appreciated how many surfaces have been crafted to...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic 26870
It's Tuesday but this is another Monday puzzle judging by the time it took me to solve which was only 37 minutes. There's one UK-centric acronym that may cause some head-scratching beyond these shores...
View ArticleMonthly Club Special No 20205 - October 2017
Solving Time: This took me a little longer than an hour altogether, in three sessions, enjoyable as always. Several clues were straightforward to solve, but rather hard to parse (eg 12ac, 26ac, 3dn,...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic No 952 by Joker
I thought this was a very classy puzzle from Joker, with elegant and succinct cluing throughout - lovely craftsmanship. With such high quality throughout, singling out any particular clues for special...
View ArticleTimes 26871 - am I wrong?
For me this puzzle fell into the catgory of those which at first sight seem impenetrable but once opened up, they unravel and reveal some fine work by the setter; by the end you wonder what was so...
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