Posted by Simon Harris on 3rd July 2010
Despite a good crop of longer entries, I seemed to find Beelzebub relatively straightforward this week, making my way through unaided, with just the one slip at 5dn.
Posted in Beelzebub | No Comments »
Posted by Mister Sting on 3rd July 2010
Bonjour! Un petit peu less ceremony with this one – just ten ‘thematically entered’ answers and four unclued entries. Still, there’s some grid highlighting to be done, which always gives one a pleasant feeling of completion – if done properly, at least! I found the clueing to be fair, with some nicely misleading touches. For some reason, the anagrind in 1ac eluded me for some time. There were some nice touches showing a caring hand – the surface reading in 15 was rather better concealed than I would have thought possible with a hidden answer, for instance. 6ac and 35 made me smile, also.
Posted in Enigmatic Variations | 5 Comments »
Posted by rightback on 3rd July 2010
Solving time: 6 mins
Unless I’m getting my compilers confused (quite possible) I found this much easier than most Gordius puzzles – there were a couple of straightforward long anagrams which helped early on, plus several clues (e.g. 10ac) where the answer was immediately obvious from the definition. The surface readings of most of the clues are good, although in several cases these are aided by superfluous words or dodgy wordplay.
Posted in Guardian | 21 Comments »