Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 31050
Hints and tips by Smylers
Hello from Ilkley, where this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival has started. This weekend all four of us saw Gyles Brandreth on AA Milne; Spouse and I saw Stuart Maconie on The Beatles; and Spouse has also seen Rachel Joyce and Emma Freud, and a talk on the material world of Austen and the Brontës. The festival runs for another fortnight, during which time we’ll see Simon Armitage (Poet Laureate), Lady Hale (former Supreme Court Judge), and Jo Hamilton (wrongly convicted subpostmaster), among others less famous. Some events are streamed online, so you don’t even have to live nearby if you’d like to see them.
The festival was founded in 1973, with WH Auden appearing that year, making it the second-longest-running book festival in the UK. Quiz question for you: which is the longest-running?
Today’s Telegraph crossword has a helpful grid and contains no obscure vocabulary, but it took me a while to decode some of the wordplay and cryptic definitions. Hints, explanations, and hidden answers are below.