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| What? | The 9th “Sloggers and Betters” gathering for crossword setters and blog contributors and readers will take place in London, following on, as last year, from the annual lunch for Times setters. |
You have reached the world’s biggest and best crossword blog. If you are looking for help with the Daily and Sunday Telegraph cryptic crosswords, a total of 11 puzzles a week, then you have come to the right place. Here you will get help with solving these puzzles, and the wordplay will be explained by fellow solvers in simple, easy to understand, terms.
If this is your first time, or for more information about this site, please click on Read More
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** - Enjoyment ***
I struggled with this today, but I don’t know why… how did you get on? Favourite clue – 21a. It took me ages to spot the anagram indicator.
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Many thanks to Digby for rushing to and from the paper shop to provide me with a scan of today’s puzzle.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the more difficult clues and provide hints for them.
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A very enjoyable puzzle from NTSPP débutant Commoner.
A review by Prolixic follows below
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As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, an assortment of clues, including some of the more difficult ones, have been selected and hints provided for them.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment *****
Tilsit is still in hospital waiting patiently for his operation so he has handed the baton to me.
It’s always a pleasure to review a Myops Toughie as you get the chance to enjoy it twice over. The blue highlighter is out in force today!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
There seemed to be a lot of clues in this puzzle where we have to chop off a leading or trailing letter and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I normally do on Fridays. Let us know your opinion.
If my hint is not good enough to give you an answer then you can reveal it by highlighting the spaces between the curly brackets under the clue. More information on how to do this if you are using a mobile device can be found in the FAQ.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment **
I took what seemed like an age….but wasn’t really… to solve this one, mainly because of the SW corner, hence the 4* difficulty rating (which I wouldn’t normally expect for a Saturday prize puzzle). I didn’t enjoy myself particularly at the time of solving, but revisiting for the review has altered my view a 10a, and that clue and the other clues that grew on me are marked in blue.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
My 100th blog for Big Dave features a Giovanni puzzle that was enjoyable to do though not very difficult. Even the pairs of unchecked letters in many of the down answers didn’t cause any significant problems (except perhaps for 1 down where the answer is a word that was new to me).
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
A pleasant but not very taxing puzzle today.
I’ve made a few changes to the site in order to try and speed up the page load time – all statistical widgets can be found on the Statistics page and other widgets have been selected to only occur on certain pages. There’s also an events widget that links to up and coming events like the Sloggers & Betters meeting in London on 30th May.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Morning All!. Just in case you are all not fully up to speed with the new postal arrangements for the closing dates of competitions at ‘Telegraph Towers’ this is the Blog of ST 2638 from Sunday 6th May. Again there is some lovely smooth surface readings here and a number of trademark Virgilius clues.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***/**** – Enjoyment ****
We have an entertaining puzzle from Beam with a few tricky bits of wordplay. Unusually there are no anagrams at all (makes a nice change). For the second day running we have one answer which also appears on the back page – is this the “theme of the week”?
Let us know how you got on and please take the time to register your enjoyment factor by clicking on one of the stars below.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Hola from the Vega Baja on a delightful sunny morning. In my opinion Jay’s on top form this morning and I really enjoyed this puzzle. Some excellent clues but enough ‘gimmes’ to get you going. For reasons unknown I found the SW corner to be the tricky bit so I’ll be interested to see if you agree.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment **
Osmosis makes a legitimate return after sneakily being released in the newspaper instead of Warbler a few weeks ago. As Toughies go, this was fair to middling in difficulty, but I’m not a great fan of some of the wordplay used.
Please leave a comment telling us what you thought. You can also add your assessment by selecting from one to five stars at the bottom of the post.
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Well, I thought 30gb was going to be enough bandwidth, but you all proved me wrong! I received an email at 5:20pm advising me that I had exceeded 80% of my bandwidth (actually it was 90%) so I immediately applied for an upgrade to unlimited bandwidth. Then at just after midnight 100% was reached. I have been given a day’s grace to process the upgrade, so all should be back to normal very soon.
{ Although it's Monday I found this one far too easy... } – 21 May, 4:39 pm
{ I found I was slow with this to-day and like... } – 21 May, 4:38 pm
{ No problems for me today, maybe I'm just lucky and... } – 21 May, 4:35 pm
{ Sun almost out in Oxford too - well, maybe that's... } – 21 May, 4:27 pm
{ Thanks to the setter and Libellule for the review and... } – 21 May, 3:32 pm
{ Whisper it quietly but the sun is cracking the pavements... } – 21 May, 3:24 pm
{ Welcome to the blog Commoner I look forward to your... } – 21 May, 1:03 pm
{ Many thanks to Dave, and to Prolixic for posting such... } – 21 May, 1:01 pm
{ I have moed South by about 500mtrs so not too... } – 21 May, 12:53 pm
{ Thanks gnomethang, for risking the Naughty Corner for me, I... } – 21 May, 10:27 am { Please don't tell me you've left the beautiful North East... } – 21 May, 8:57 am
{ Hey Dave - good videos! Sounds of my youth 
... } – 20 May, 10:24 pm
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