DT 25966 – Hints – Big Dave's Crossword Blog
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DT 25966 – Hints

Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 25966 – Hints

Selected hints by Big Dave

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BD Rating – Difficulty ** Enjoyment **

A disappointing Prize Puzzle from our Saturday Supremo.  As long as you know the London Underground system you should have no problems today.

As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the better clues and provide hints for them. Peter Biddlecombe’s full review of this puzzle will be published at 12.00 on Thursday, 2nd July.

Across

1a One time in Italy revert to previous speed (1,5)
A (one) is followed by the Italian for time to give a musical instruction to revert to previous speed which comes from, yes you’ve guessed, Italian

25a Rudd’s colourful feature (3-3)
An alternative name for this fish which refers to one of its features

Down

2d Sycophancy to dismay eccentric (8)
Eccentric tells you that you need an anagram of TO DISMAY to get a synonym for sycophancy

7d A new growth Henry, sailor, and I found in the capital (3,5)
A gentle charade of A then a new growth on a plant, the abbreviation the Henry (the SI unit of inductance), an Able Bodied seaman and I lead us to the capital of the United Arab Emirates

19d Magazine found on the Piccadilly Line (7)
A place for storing military weapons that is also a station on the Piccadilly Line – this station is named after the second best football team in North London, which moved there from Woolwich in 1913

Piccadilly Line from South West at the top to North East at the bottom

I though I would take a moment to explain how I decide on the clues to go in this hints-only post.  I always do the first across and down clues, then any that refer to names of places, girls or boys, and finally any that are particularly tricky.  Today that formula results in a mere handful of hints.  If you need more, add a comment and I will see what I can do.  Please don’t give away any answers or your comment may be censored.

13 comments on “DT 25966 – Hints

  1. Wow – I actually finished this one – good one for beginners like me – lots of nice anagrams but I had to guess at ******* -19d – a bit unfair for us folk who do not know anything about the London Underground

    1. I had to rely on Google to confirm this one Mary!, like you, I don’t know the names of all the stations on the London Underground.

  2. Disappointing crossword especially after so much promise had been shown in last Saturdays excellent one.Liked 9a, but disliked 1a.

  3. Usual Saturday situation has resumed. The easiest crossowrdof the week by a mile. I challenge a future compiler to set a clue for West Bromwich Albion the local team where I was born!!

  4. Surprised at this one – breezed through it all too quickly, which left me rather disappointed, as in ‘what shall I do now?’
    It’s often the case that the prize crossword is easier than the ones in the week; shouldn’t it be the other way round?

    1. I wrote this in the hints for DT 25948:

      “There is an expectation that the Saturday prize puzzle will be more difficult than the weekday ones, but this has certainly not been the case in the Telegraph in recent years. Being cynical, I suspect that this is a marketing ploy designed to sell more copies of the newspaper!”

  5. I thought the second best team in North London was Tottenham reserves!

  6. I suppose I will again be one of 1000s of other people trying to win a book token. 12 years of trying and not a sniff!

    1. I wonder how many people on average enter the prize crossword draw, and therefore what the chances are of winning something? If there were 3,000 correct entries then the chance would be 1 in 200. So roughly if you entered every week you would expect to win something once every four years. Of course I just made up the 3,000 number though

      1. I did ask the Puzzles Editor, but he declined to give a figure. My guess is that they never bother to count them all and that the real figure is even higher than you suggest.

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