Comments on: Guardian 23975/Brendan – back to the books http://www.fifteensquared.net/2007/01/16/guardian-23975brendan-%e2%80%93-back-to-the-books/ Never knowingly undersolved. Sun, 19 May 2013 23:34:42 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: <![CDATA[rightback]]> http://www.fifteensquared.net/2007/01/16/guardian-23975brendan-%e2%80%93-back-to-the-books/#comment-717 Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:11:53 +0000 http://fifteensquared.net/?p=193#comment-717 Under 4 minutes on this is astonishing. I thought several answers were pretty obscure: are Barnes, Conrad and Greene (or their novels?) connected somehow?

I only knew Nantucket via a limerick which had me in stitches when I first heard it, though I couldn’t possibly reproduce it here.

]]> By: <![CDATA[ilancaron]]> http://www.fifteensquared.net/2007/01/16/guardian-23975brendan-%e2%80%93-back-to-the-books/#comment-716 Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:37:55 +0000 http://fifteensquared.net/?p=193#comment-716 ok… so tell me about the world cup bribery scandal trap i didn’t even see…

]]> By: <![CDATA[michod]]> http://www.fifteensquared.net/2007/01/16/guardian-23975brendan-%e2%80%93-back-to-the-books/#comment-715 Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:01:44 +0000 http://fifteensquared.net/?p=193#comment-715 Blimey, four minutes is good – I wasn’t counting, but pretty sure it was under ten. Some nice clues here, especially TIME-LAG. One I was less keen on was SUGAR CUBE, which I think fell into a trap that’s quite common for cryptic definitions. Brendan presumably meant to mislead us into thinking about World Cup bribery scandals, but I immdeiately read the surface as being about tea, which meant ‘regular’ was the only vaguely cryptic component.

]]> By: <![CDATA[loonapick]]> http://www.fifteensquared.net/2007/01/16/guardian-23975brendan-%e2%80%93-back-to-the-books/#comment-714 Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:21:54 +0000 http://fifteensquared.net/?p=193#comment-714 This one had the feel of an American crossword (long themed entries entered symmetrically in the grid), and was very enjoyable to solve. My only gripe with it was that, if you recognised the theme and the writers fairly quickly, the crossword took very little time to solve – I took less than four minutes (a personal best for the Gaurdian!).

As an amateur (oh, how I’d love to be professional!) setter myself, I can appreciate that this is the type of puzzle that probably took a lot of time to create, but which takes a fraction of that time to solve.

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