Toughie No 770 by Elgar
Moonlighting?? – No, Just Dancing on the Sand!
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***** – Enjoyment *****
Matron has insisted that young Tilsit remain for another week in Convalescent Corner, which means that I have crept out of the Weekend Retreat for the second time this week, in order to blog my first whole Toughie.  Having sorted out the wordplay (I hope!), I do wonder if perhaps Matron knew what Tilsit was in for with this particular crossword!!
At the bottom of the puzzle in the paper it says ‘All at sea? See the note under the back-page Cryptic Crossword solution’.  Look there and, if you can read upside down, you learn that tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the 6a whose best-known work is celebrated here.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26863
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
Giovanni has his trickier hat on today, but this one is well worth persevering with and has some cracking clues. How did you fare with it?
If you need to see an answer just highlight the space between the brackets under the clue; if you’re accessing the blog from an I-thingy or similar there is some advice on how to do this in the FAQ.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26858
A full review by crypticsue
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Cephas put on his slightly trickier hat last Saturday and gave us an entertaining  crossword with a nice mix of clues, including his usualbeautifully indicated anagrams.  The difficulty rating just sneaked into the 3* category because of problems I had with two clues.
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Toughie No 769 by Shamus
Hints and tips by Bufo
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
I enjoyed this puzzle even though I found it to be at the easy end of the Toughie spectrum. There were some nice clues and all were perfectly fair.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26862
Hints and tips by Big Dave
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ****
Ray T is back! I thought this was one of his easier puzzles, but feel free to disagree. Just a little bit of innuendo and a brief visit from the Queen this time
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Sunday Telegraph Cryptic No 2637
A full review by crypticsue
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BD Rating – Difficulty * – Enjoyment ****
Â
Before I start getting comments from people who think I have reviewed the wrong crossword, can I just remind everyone that, Â because Telegraph Puzzles have extended the end date for Sunday puzzles from five days after publication to eleven days after publication, Â Â this, if you can remember that far back, is the crossword which appeared on Sunday 29 April.
Once again, Virgilius provided us with a splendid treat of a puzzle – it was almost a shame that it was so straightforward as it was over all too soon.  Lots of entertainment as usual and I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.
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The All New Toughie Crossword Book
100 of the most difficult cryptic crosswords
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The Telegraph has just released two books of Toughie Crosswords, covering the first 200 Toughie puzzles. I was pleased to see that, in his Editor’s Note, Phil McNeill describes Elgar as being “known to his fans as ‘Vlad the Impaler'”. You read that here for the first time in a comment that I made back in July 2011.
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Toughie No 768 by Elkamere
We’ll Take That As Red
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***– Enjoyment ****
We have a very entertaining puzzle from Elkamere, but with one clue which is bound to infuriate half of the solvers (to be fair Elkamere has made its wordplay about as easy as he could). There is a mini-theme relating to alcohol. I enjoyed it a lot – how about you?
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26861
Hints and tips by pommers
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BD Rating – Difficulty ** – Enjoyment ***
Hola from the Vega Baja and welcome to my 50th blog – not exactly Sachin Tendulkar but a half century ain’t bad!
We have a rather unusual grid today with twelve sets of ‘double unches’ but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of another excellent Wednesday puzzle.
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Toughie No 767 by Warbler
George, Harris and Jerome (To Say Nothing of Montmorency)
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment *****
I’m not used to getting puzzles this good on a Tuesday! This was a real tour de force from Warbler – with a number of traps for the unwary (me!) in clues like 11a, 14a and 17d, to name but three.
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