Category: Daily Cryptic

Solving time 25 minutes Quite a lively puzzle with a wide range of clue structures that include only one anagram. There’s a levening of general knowledge required but no real obscurities with the possible exception … Read more “Times 24,540 Begbie meets Kipling”

Solving time: 30 minutes Music: Sibelius, Violin Concerto Belkin/Ashkenazy/LSO This is the first puzzle I’ve had to blog that I consider somewhat unsatisfactory. For me, the cryptics lacked the precision one expects in a Ximinean … Read more “Times 24539 – In search of the lost cloud”

Solving time: About 5 mins (interrupted, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately given my mistake at 7dn) Struggling for time at the moment I tried to cram this into what I thought was a suitable gap; it … Read more “ST 4380 (Sun 9 May) – S Club 7 x 2”

Solving time: 9.02 Nothing too difficult here, with the wordplay being pretty much conclusive where I wasn’t certain of the definition. There were lots of very accessible multi-word answers and several anagrams too. I lost … Read more “Times Crossword 24537”

Coming back from a week of no crossword while visiting Shanghai, it took me quite a while (nearly an hour) to get into the groove. Nevertheless, it was quite fun especially the superb 3S (short, … Read more “Times 24536 – Short Simple & Sweet”

Solving time 17:04, late last night. I think this is down to crafty clue-writing rather than late-night dimness but may be proved wrong … Across 1 UNCOORDINATED – RD.=way, in (education, on)* – time wasted … Read more “24535 – not exactly L for leather”

Around 25 minutes, for a puzzle which I would describe as punching above its weight i.e. with a lot of clues where I could see what I was being asked to do but took a … Read more “Times 24,534”

Solving Time: 40 odd minutes Mostly the answers flowed straight from eye to pen, but I was eventually inordinately delayed in the SE corner and defeated in the SW by an elk. What more can … Read more “Times 24533 – Och, there’s a moose in the hoose”

Solving time: about 5 mins A reasonable puzzle with a few quibbles here and there, mostly with regard to the cryptic ‘grammar’ of the clues, but no actual mistakes that I saw. There are a … Read more “ST 4379 (Sun 2 May) – Hung up”

Solving time – about 2 weeks in the end! After about half an hour I had most of it solved without aids – 12A, 19D and the whole of the SW corner were all I … Read more “TLS 829 (16th April) – scraped home!”