Morph has given us his usual very sound and pleasant crossword. It was always my impression that Morph’s clues were on the wordy side, but I counted them (yes I really did, I have to admit) and the average word-length of each clue is only 7, which compares quite favourably with Dean Mayer’s last Sunday Times puzzle of 6.8. I had always thought that Dean’s clues were particularly pithy, but this one was not all that far behind. Anyway, perhaps it’s a bit silly to focus on length: quality is what it’s about, and there was plenty of quality here.
Month: June 2016
Financial Times 15,247 – Dante
Monday Prize Crossword / May 23, 2016
Dante likes his double and cryptic definitions. But is that shocking news? No.
Financial Times 15,246 by Goliath
Prize puzzle from the Weekend FT of May 21, 2016
Financial Times 15,255 by IO
Difficult to solve and difficult to blog. Just plain difficult really. There are a couple of solutions that I still can’t explain even after a protracted search. Thank you Io for the mental workout and another chastening experience!
Guardian Cryptic 26,899 by Screw
Struggled to finish this, with several left unparsed until the end – I still can’t work out 16dn (Edit: thanks PGreen). Favourites 13ac and 8dn. Thanks, Screw.
Independent 9245 / Dac
What can we say? Another excellent Dac, which for some reason we found slightly tougher than normal. As usual, excellent surfaces, with an ingenious definition at 1d. We were delighted that our favourite … Read more >>
Inquisitor 1439: Evolution by Kruger
Preamble: Each clue contains either a single letter misprint in the definition or wordplay leading to an extra or missing letter (equal numbers of each). In clue order, the correct/extra/missing letters give an … Read more >>