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View ArticleTimes 26893 - One for horryd
A pleasant Mondayesque journey through Crosswordland, with a bit of Classics in the SE for me, and a garment on the distaff side, which immediately had me in mind of horryd and his goat. I've heard of...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic 970 by Mara
This one took me 2 minutes over my target 10 because I had a complete blank on my last one in, 13ac, which on reflection now seems quite inexplicable. I thought this was mostly straightforward although...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic 971 by Flamande
This grid was defined, to me, by the four 11 letter clues. I enjoyed 17ac and cod 5dn and struggled with the (part) anagrams in 9dn and loi 11ac. Add these to some African warriors and lots of...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic 26894
I found this one quite hard work and needed 55 minutes to complete it, but thankfully without resort to aids as there were no difficult words or references.As usual definitions are underlined in bold...
View ArticleNew Times Update!
For those who may not have seen this posted in the Times Crossword Club Forum. The great news is that new puzzles now print in a decent size font with light grey squares. And this applies now to the...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 972 by Orpheus
I found this to be one of those puzzles which feels quite tricky at the time, but then when you write up the blog you wonder why you made comparatively heavy weather of it. Nothing obscure, not much GK...
View ArticleTimes 26895 - TCC heat 2 puzzle 1. Planting an idea or two.
I had fun with this one, IMO the easiest yet of the four Heats puzzles so far published. I'd have finished it in well under the par of 20 minutes were it not for the NE corner where 5a and 5d held me...
View ArticleTimes 26896 - 19 your booty (or 19 your 19).
Solving time : 8:39 - and I thought it looked more tricky than usual, so I was surprised to find my time at 5th out of the first 15 solvers. There's a wide range of knowledge in this puzzle, but the...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic No 973 by Hurley
A most enjoyable puzzle from Hurley today. I blogged a Hurley puzzle a couple of months ago when I was suffering from a self-inflicted sore head, and I was correspondingly jaded in my assessment of it....
View ArticleClub Monthly 20206 - November 2017
Just over forty minutes for this, in two sessions, so a little easier than average for me. Entertaining as always, and although there is the usual high number of classical and archaic references, there...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 974 by Oran
Six and a half minutes for a fairly straightforward one. The answers were sometimes more obvious than the parsing, and there are a couple I'm not entirely happy with. I will be interested to hear what...
View ArticleTimes 26,897: Divided By A Common Language
I don't know if I'd call this puzzle fully Fridayish (pace 8dn), but it was at the very least Tuesdayish, slowing me up with some trickier clues towards the end to a final tune of 8 minutes. I...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic No 26892 - Saturday, 25 November 2017. Give it to me straight,...
Harder than last week for me, but very enjoyable. Every clue was solvable, even the beast at 18ac, and every answer went in with that satisfying feeling, “yes, clearly that’s it”. I didn’t know a...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic Jumbo No 1294 (18/11/17): Feline Groovy
I really enjoyed this Jumbo which went in easily, not I think because it was overly simplistic but because it was well clued and entertaining throughout. There was an archaic feel to some of the lingo...
View ArticleSunday Times 4774 by David McLean
9:27. Straightforward stuff from Harry here. I have been very busy this week, so didn’t get to the blog until yesterday. When this happens I can seldom remember anything about the solve, and so it has...
View ArticleMephisto - placeholder
Greetings all, running way behind. Here's a placeholder for the Mephisto, feel free to ask questions of the hive mind, but I don't think I'll be able to get to this until Monday morning.
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 975 by Grumpy
This appears to be Grumpy's first puzzle for over a year and perhaps that lack of recent familiarity contributed to me finding it a bit harder than average. There's little that could be described as...
View ArticleTimes 26899 - What a fool conceives?
Music: Love, RevisitedTime: 50 minutesI found this one really tough, mainly due to several answers I simply did not know. As in Mephisto or the Club Monthly, it is possible to laboriously construct...
View ArticleTimes Quick Cryptic 976 by Mara
The debate on completion times last week established that some find them off-putting whilst others find them helpful or irrelevant. In order to try to please most of the people most of the time I’ll...
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