Never knowingly undersolved
Friday 23rd-Sunday 25th October 2026 I’m pleased to announce that the York Sloggers & Betters event is once again scheduled for “Clock Weekend”, allowing everyone an extra hour to recover from Friday and … Read more >>
This is Bluejacket’s fourth Thursday puzzle of 2026, and I’ve been the blogger for three of them in a row: perhaps he’s on the same four-week cycle as the Indy blogging rota.
A typical Steerpike puzzle.
The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/30036.
“Eight across clues have an extra word to be removed before solving; its position in the clue indexes which of its letters to select. When read in clue order these letters might be a description of someone and when unjumbled what they were interested in. A nickname occupies the top row of the grid and the names of the PROTEGEES it refers to run around the rest of the perimeter. The unclued entries should be completed with their study groups, one of which is hanging upside down. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.”
Phew! A meaty, but quite exceptional challenge from IO.
Tramp makes a welcome return quite soon after his recent Prize puzzle
We have another good crossword from Eccles this Wednesday.
A tricky solve, with many fun clues and several bits of parsing that needed more time at the end. Many thanks to Vlad for the puzzle.
Deri is another compiler whose work I have had little opportunity to solve and/or blog.
Peto often lands on my blogging rotation, so I would imagine that by now I would not find these puzzles quite so tough to parse out as I did this one . . .
A circular grid this week, as befits the theme.
This was quite the challenge from Prak, and a pangram (and nina – thanks to commenters for spotting).
Great fun from Philistine today. I really have nothing to add to that, so thanks to him for the puzzle.