Could not have got poet at 23a without recourse to google. Indian word in 3d is spelt differently in Chambers. 8d was a very hard nut to crack.

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Azed last (and I think first) set a special of this kind in June 2008. Tilsit reported finding it very difficult (and I see from the comments that I did too), and I would say the same about this one. I think this is at least partly because of the very high proportion of relatively obscure words – I’d say getting on for two-thirds of the answers – though some of them were guessable from experience or (eventually) deducible from the wordplay and crossing letters. Ten pairs of mismatching intersections may not seem much out of a grid of 144 squares, but the stipulation that “no across or down word in the diagram is affected more than once” means that ten across and ten down answers have to be changed – more than half of both. My technique was to pencil in answers as I (quite slowly, and over several sessions) got them, and ink in the unaffected letters as I identified the mismatches. Because of the ambiguity of what the replacement letter should be (e.g. A/M could give either G or, by “treating the alphabet as cyclical”, T), I didn’t spot the “female forename” until I’d found almost all the intersections.

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A pleasant solve, with a good variety of clue types. A certain amount of general knowledge is required, but nothing seems to me to be too obscure, although in 11A we have the combination of wordplay more convoluted than most and a reference unfamiliar to me, at least. Read the rest of this entry »