Category: Weekend Cryptic

Solving time 11:30 A welcome relief after the previous Saturday’s really hard puzzle! No obscure vocabulary, and some very well-constructed clues with excellent surface reading. I expect the faster solvers here will have halved my … Read more “Times Saturday 23480”

No sour grapes this time. Nice selection of clues with not much to complain about. Some surprisingly well-hidden wordplay (20A, 21D) and some good &lits (16D). Across 1 SUNGLASSES – cryptic definition. 7 BASS – … Read more “Sunday Times 4203/no sour grapes this time”

Solving time – I dread to think. Certainly over an hour, in three sessions. After a few weeks of fairly straightforward Saturday puzzles they’ve come up with an absolute stinker. For a while I was … Read more “Times Saturday 23474 – a real stinker!”

Not a bad puzzle. A couple of clever wordplays. Actually I’m finding it hard to remember what I thought about this puzzle since I wrote these notes a week ago. Perhaps there’s a theme here … Read more “Sunday Times 4202 – etaerio”

Solving time 12:35 In retrospect that seems like a fairly indifferent time, as there don’t seem to be too many tricky clues, although there are a few interesting answers. I remember taking a while to … Read more “Times Saturday 23468 – the Persians are coming!”

Apparently this puzzle was published online with more than a couple of mistakes. I think I’ve been able to identify them… Across 1 BLUESTOC+KINGS – (close but)* followed by KINGS for “top blokes”, I suppose … Read more “Sunday Times 4201/mistakes”

I forgot to make a note of my solving time last week, but I know it would have been sub-10 minutes but for a daft mistake at 5d which stopped me getting 5a for a … Read more “Times Saturday 23462 – easiest Saturday for a while?”

The SE corner held me up: took me as long to solve as the all the rest of the puzzle: total 1/2h. All in all, not as easy as last week’s and slowed down my … Read more “Sunday Times 4200/hang on – not so fast”

Solving time 15:34 I was going to mention the interesting puzzle number with consecutive digits, and that the next time this happens will be some time in 2042, but Pete beat me to it last … Read more “Saturday Times 23456”

I think I actually did this in under 10 minutes which is by far a record for me. Either it was unusually easy or my neurons were all firing laterally. Or both. I think experience … Read more “Sunday Times 4199/fastest ever”