A rare occasion where I can explain every clue, I think. Not to suggest that this was easy, rather it was classic Beelzebub, I thought.

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It’ll be interesting to hear how other solvers found this. It seemed to me to be a step up in difficulty and inventiveness for Crosophile and for Sundays in general. Either way, it was very good.

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Well, I must say these Genius puzzles vary a lot in difficulty. After two hard ones from Araucaria and Tramp, I found this one from Crucible hardly more difficult than a standard daily puzzle. It was pretty obvious that the “classed catalogue of words” mentioned in the preamble would be Roget’s Thesaurus, but the reference to “the Dutch version” was a little more puzzling. It turns out that Robert Dutch produced the first “Americanised” version of the Thesaurus. The undefined answers are the six main “classes” of words used in Dutch’s version: Abstract Relations, Affections, Intellect, Matter, Space and Volition, which I remember being intrigued by in the Penguin edition that I owned in the early 1970s. Read the rest of this entry »

Lorraine:  Good morning one and all,

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As always an utterly satisfactory crossword from Azed. In several of these clues there is very neat wordplay, with words doing duty as different parts of speech according to whether they are in the definition or the subsidiary indication. It as usual took me plenty of time, but no more than usual, and there wasn’t that feeling of panic: I knew that sooner or later all would be done. And so far as I can see that was so. Read the rest of this entry »