I did most of this on the tube, without Chambers, which is an interesting exercise – you have to make quite a few educated guesses and then corroborate them via the dictionary later (I came unstuck doing this in the competition puzzle a few weeks ago when I forgot to check one guess, which was in fact a word of my own invention!) Fifteen words that were new to me – more across than down – which is why doing Azed’s so good for your vocabulary. His clueing is beautifully concise, and a lot of the wordplay’s actually very straightforward once you work out how to split the clue.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of these days I’m going to miss a theme in an Everyman. I’ve stared at this one but no joy. Though I always enjoy solving Everyman – which typically takes about 1/2h to 45’ for me.
Across Read the rest of this entry »