Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Another dose of quality, this week with a govt/military flavour in quite a few of the long answers – Magna Carta, Victoria Cross, esprit de corps, and secret service. Overall difficulty matched an easy but not very easy Times puzzle.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
Quite a tricky Sunday puzzle by current standards – especially if like me you don’t see 1A on first look.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Much easier than last week for me, but there’s plenty to see. First, a bit of symmetry – half-turn rotational symmetry still applies when you’ve drawn in little bars to mark word breaks in multi-word answers.
Legend: (act)* indicates an anagram of act
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
Quite a tough puzzle this week – a change from the usual gentle Sunday stroll. No harm in this when it’s a prize puzzle, and an easy few months or so may have been deliberate while solvers adapted to a style very different to the old Sunday Telegraph puzzles.
Continue reading “ST 2505”
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
A pretty straightforward one this, with quite a few unsurprising breakdowns of words. But then I knew the funny word at 27 from years of Times solving, and as mentioned below, this setter is feeding other little bits of Times xwd culture into his Telegraph puzzles, which is fine with me – I’m all for shring the tricks around rather than having parochial specials. As ever from this setter, this easy puzzle has lots of good clue-writing in it and there are good surface readings achieved without resorting to dodgy practices like perverse word ordering.
Continue reading “ST 2504”
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
I lost my original copy of this, but think it took a little longer than usual, as I’d entered quite a convincing red herring answer at 8D and had to correct this to get 4A – ?O?S?S?T didn’t look any more likely than ?O?S?S?R
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
A fairly straightforward puzzle, with one very minor possible slip-up by the setter at 26D.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
(This is written without looking at the Sunday hints message to see what’s been said so far.) We couldn’t really expect this puzzle to match the anniversary one last week, and we’re back to everyday fare here. There are some fairly easy clues, especially for old hands, but there’s lots of crossword-setting craft – in particular, consistently solid surface meanings. 3D is a particular favourite of mine, being a former distance runner, conjuring up images of someone like Emil Zatopek, whose laboured style can be seen in this film about his rivalry with Alan Mimoun. Meanwhile, back to the clues ….
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
As expected, this puzzle was a bit out of the ordinary. At least in the online version, it was accompanied by a warning message attached to the first across and down clues: “WARNING: Two answers in this special 2500th puzzle require numbers as well as letters. The figure zero must be entered as a capital O.” This spoiled any possible surprise but I guess it was necessary for clarity when completing entries online.
Our Sunday setter specialises in thematic puzzles when writing as Virgilius or Brendan, so it’s no surprise that the thematic element here is handled elegantly – each of the Across rows in the grid has one word in the theme, which is clarified by the clue for 28A.
The thematic stuff led to some strange words elsewhere but solvers seem to have found even the one that’s not a proper English word – or so some of us thought – see below.
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
After a few months of the variable delights of the Saturday puzzle, Dave has given me the privilege of writing about the Sunday puzzle in its new style. What a change! Instead of wondering how much to bang on about the clues that annoy me, I’m now trying to make sure I don’t miss any of the very clever aspects of these clues. It seems to be current DT policy not to name the setter for each day, but if this puzzle wasn’t written by Brian Greer (Brendan and Virgilius elsewhere and a former Times xwd editor, now back on their setting team), it’s by someone who’s learned a lot from Brian and other good setters. This puzzle was relatively tricky for Brian – his scrupulously fair clues mean that I can get through some of his puzzles pretty swiftly. I look forward to something with an extra twist to celebrate ST No. 2500 next week.