Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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The fourth chapter in Anax’s guide to the rules which crossword setters use – Containers / Insertions – is now available.… Continue reading
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***– Enjoyment ***
Hello everybody welcome to Monday! I thought this crossword was a little more difficult that we have had for the last few weeks, however it did not detract from the enjoyment. Are there too many anagrams? Possibly, but it’s still a very good puzzle. Favourite clues have to be 11a and 28a just for their sheer simplicity.
If the hint is not enough to allow you to work out the answer, just highlight the space between the curly brackets.
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The usual few hints to get you started.
Don’t forget that you can give your assessment of the puzzle. Five stars if you thought it was great, one if you hated it, four, three or two if it was somewhere in between.
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 Friday, 18th June.
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Big Dave met Tim at the Sloggers and Betters meeting in London a few weeks ago. Out of the blue, Tim submitted a puzzle for the Blog. To have a setter of Tim’s calibre volunteering a puzzle is something of a coup. They flock to Big Dave’s door these days!
This crossword was joy to solve. It should be well within the abilities of most solvers. The only clue where the wordplay detained me was 9a where the answer was obvious but how you got to it was not. Many thanks to Big Dave for putting me on the straight and narrow. Thanks too to Tim for the crossword.
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Welcome to the eighteenth in our series of weekly puzzles.
This week we are fortunate to have a puzzle from Tim Moorey. Tim is a crossword setter for the Sunday Times, The Week and others. He is the author of How to Master The Times Crossword, published by HarperCollins, and a consultant for Chambers Crossword Dictionary.
An experienced adult tutor, he is a sought after speaker on crosswords, for example being on the WI speaker panels for Surrey, Kent and Essex. You can read more about his Crossword Workshops here or visit his website here.
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A few hints to get you started
Don’t forget that you can give your assessment of the puzzle. Five stars if you thought it was great, one if you hated it, four, three or two if it was somewhere in between.
As is usual for the weekend prize crosswords, I will select a few of the better clues and provide hints for them. A full review of this puzzle will be published on Thursday, 17th June.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
If any of you are about to pick your jaws off the floor after seeing a 2-star difficulty rating, let me just say that from time to time it’s possible to be on the setter’s wavelength from clue 1, and for the answers to flood in with barely a pause. It’s quite rare, but it happens. That was certainly the case here, with nine across answers entered almost without thinking, which of course was an ideal start for filling several downs as well. To be honest I could have reduced the rating to 1 star, but while the answers went in quickly there were occasions when unravelling the wordplay wasn’t straightforward, and as I write this I’m still thinking about 24a and 28a.
Easy as the puzzle is, there are some cracking clues as you’d expect from Elgar, 4d being the pick of the bunch, and the odd bit of signature naughtiness. Another Elgar trademark is the occasional strangeness of surface reading – perhaps a few more than usual in this puzzle.
As ever, my favourite clues are in blue.
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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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment *****
Watch out for the multi-word definitions in this one – among the def+wordplay clues, only 17A, 27A, 7D and 13D have one-word definitions. Watch out for lots of other good stuff too – three &lit/all-in-one clues, a 13-letter hidden word, and some classic examples of the trick of making you look for synonyms of words when you don’t need to. This is one for aspiring setters to keep as an example of what they should be aiming at – apart from the highlights, every clue has a convincing surface reading and every cryptic reading makes perfect logical sense.
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
I took longer than I should have to do this puzzle by Giovanni (partly explained by my putting in the wrong answer for 5a) because in retrospect I don’t think that it’s one of his more difficult ones. What’s your opinion? Leave us a comment and please remember to vote by clicking on one of the stars at the bottom.
As always, the answers are hidden between the brackets under the clues. Just highlight the space between the brackets to reveal them.
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment **
A bit of a curate’s egg today with a couple of interesting and challenging clues, plus a number of very hackneyed ones: 9a, 11a, 22a, 1D, 20d and 24d. As I’ve said before, there will be some of you who have never seen these before, but 11 across was one of the first clues I ever solved in a crossword at some tender age.
I also wasn’t keen on a couple of clues, as you’ll see in the narrative. Overall I thought it rather easy for a Thursday and probably just about suitable for the Telegraph daily.
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.