Category: Daily Cryptic

Solving time : 25 minutes An entertaining puzzle with some good clues and interesting constructions. Also quite a range of knowledge required from the usual sources plus a little piece of Euclidean geometry. The non-cricketing … Read more “Times 24,349 Take a butchers me old china”

Solving time: 28 minutes Music: Wagner Orchestral Excerpts, Furtwangler This one should have been easy, but I had two wrong entries for a while and mis-wrote a correct entry, causing considerable difficulties in getting the … Read more “Times 24348 – Live from the Kemble, it’s the Sardonic Rumpus!”

Solving time: 9:21 Not a great puzzle but at least free of mistakes, as far I can see. I wasted two minutes on 20dn (GRACKLE) at the end, and also didn’t know 21dn (BORNITE). * … Read more “ST 4348 (Sun 27 Sep) – Bornite entity”

Solving time: 28.20. I had hoped that the crossword gods would give me a break after Samuel Johnson two weeks ago, but no such luck – I found this very hard indeed. The top half … Read more “Times Crossword 24346”

Solving time: 15:23 Reasonably steady solve until after 10 minutes I had only three left (4 (SUBSTANCES), 6 (THE BEAR) and 7 (COMMA)). And they took another 5 minutes. Looking at them now I can’t … Read more “Times 24,345”

Solving time: 8:04 Another straightforward puzzle, slowed down here by taking about four goes to see the right author at 2, dimness at 29 after an early stab at TRESTLE, and failure to see the … Read more “Times 24344”

I found this to be a very enjoyable 14 minutes, flirting with some quite chestnutty material without being trite, and introducing me to one or two new things for future reference. The fact that I … Read more “Times 24,343 – Sheer Poetry”

Solving time: 50 mins This was blogged in extenuating circumstances, solved online, with a wireless internet “connection” which remained so only when not required to find a site. I’m on a short break in remote … Read more “Times 24342 – Greetings from the Midlands”

Solving time: 4:37 When I saw the anagram at 11ac a bell rang, so I did a bit of a search to see when it last came up. It turned out to be July 2008, … Read more “ST 4347 (Sun 20 Sep) – Déjà vu”

I made rather heavy weather of this one and must have spent over an hour on it. I printed it just past midnight in case the site was down again for maintenance and as it … Read more “24340 – Murder!”