Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26058
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ***
Regular solvers will recognise the style of today’s setter, and as usual he has provided a good variety of clues and a few smiles.
As always the answers are hidden inside the curly brackets to prevent your seeing them accidentally – just select the white space inside the brackets if you want to reveal one.
Your comments are warmly welcomed, and we specially want to hear from those who have not yet left a comment – pluck up your courage and introduce yourself. We are a friendly lot and won’t bite – and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a complete novice trying your first cryptic crossword or you’ve been doing them for years.
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Actually Setting
The anatomy of a crossword
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Prior to this year’s Times Crossword Championship Dave and I had never met, but we quickly fell into conversation and I reckon I spent more time talking to Dave than anyone else. At some point the conversation turned to what it is a setter actually does when putting together a puzzle, and I said something – can’t remember exactly what – that must have come as something of a surprise. We both realised that there doesn’t currently seem to be a published in-depth description of the nuts and bolts processes of crossword setting. Yes, there’s plenty of “technical stuff”. And – a thought that just suddenly occurred to me – Tim Moorey gives some page space to it in his “How To Master The Times Crossword”; but that excellent book is primarily a guide to solving and the setting section restricts itself to describing the sorts of wordplay devices a setter looks for.
Dave very kindly invited me to put into words what I now find myself struggling to put into words – perhaps this is a cop-out, but I’m going to describe it as the “feeling” behind the creation of a cryptic crossword.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26057
Hints and tips by Big Dave
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
Many thanks to Gazza and Libellule for looking after the blog this weekend while I was away in Cheltenham.
I don’t know if it was because I was recovering from the excesses of the weekend, but I found today’s contribution from the Monday Maestro to be a fair bit harder than usual (cue complaints from the usual suspects!). The cryptic definition at 1 across was one of the best in a Monday puzzle for a long time and I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge that Rufus has set.
Another minor landmark – this is the 500th post on the blog (and the 5,000th comment was added last week).
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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ScrewedUp News – Oct 11
Edition 22
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Its been a while since we had to post a ScrewedUp News item. August 1st was the last time.… Continue reading
Sunday Telegraph Cryptic No 2505 – Hints
Are They Getting Harder?
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BD Rating – Difficulty **** – Enjoyment ****
If you’ve woken up this morning feeling a bit under the weather you’ll probably need a good supply of caffeine to give you the strength to tackle this puzzle. It’s a real challenge, and it seems to me that it’s approaching the standard of a Toughie, but all the clues are impeccably constructed and I really enjoyed battling with it.
As usual, we don’t publish answers for the prize puzzles until the entry deadline has passed. Below are a few hints for some of the more interesting clues, to help you get started.
All comments are appreciated, but please do not include any full or partial answers.
Peter Biddlecombe’s full review of this puzzle will be published at 12.00 on Friday, 16th October.
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Obscure Words
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There has been much discussion in the comments recently about the use of obscure words in the Daily cryptics. As you might expect, this problem has not been confined to the Telegraph puzzles. Hugh Stephenson, the Guardian’s crossword editor, has kindly given permission for this extract from his monthly newsletter to be reproduced here.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26056 – Hints
Big Dave’s Saturday Crossword Club
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BD Rating – Difficulty * – Enjoyment **
Tilsit is spending the weekend with me and we will be in Cheltenham on Saturday afternoon at the Kemble Brewery Inn and later at a nearby curry house. The following day we will be cheering (very quietly) for Peter Biddlecombe and John “Elgar” Henderson at the Times Crossword Championship. This all means that I will not be available from lunchtime today, but our very own double act of Gazza & Libellule will do their best to answer your queries and maintain law and order.
Latst update: Unfortunately Tilsit has had a bad fall – that alone would not have stopped him from coming but he broke his spectacles as well and can’t get a replacement pair until Monday at the earliest. I will at the pub from about 4.00 pm onwards.
Those of you that like your Saturday puzzles to be easy are going to be very happy today. This one is responsible for me having a very early night!
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 by Tilsit will be published at 12.00 on Thursday, 15th October.
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Sunday Telegraph Cryptic No 2504
A full analysis by Peter Biddlecombe
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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.
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Toughie No 231 by Firefly
Is this one tough enough for you?
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BD Rating – Difficulty ***** – Enjoyment ****
I sometimes wonder about the affect this blog is having on the setters. Firefly, known elsewhere as Glow-worm, was the first to leave a comment on the blog, way back in February (Toughie 92) and his puzzles do seem to be getting steadily tougher. This is the first one of his to get close to making me lose my bonus points on CluedUp! While I enjoyed the puzzle there were a number of instances where I had to guess an answer from the checking letters and then pick my way through the wordplay afterwards.
Feel free, as ever, to leave a comment and don’t forget to give us your assessment by selecting from one to five stars at the bottom of the post.
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Daily Telegraph Cryptic No 26055
Hints and tips by Gazza
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
It was all a bit like groundhog day. There was I, relaxing over a late breakfast and wrestling with today’s Toughie, when I got a message from Libellule saying that his communication problems have resurfaced so that he could not do the review. So I’m afraid that you’re stuck with me again.
Not that reviewing a Giovanni puzzle is ever a chore – it’s well up to his usual standard, so that means some excellent surface readings with a number of smiles, not to say guffaws.
We’d be delighted to get your comments as usual.
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