Inquisitor

Solving time : Three or four hours, on and off. I always worry when I can do 1 across straight away, and this was no exception! I filled in most of the grid, but … Read more >>

Working away from home for the last couple of weeks meant doing most of this puzzle quickly last night. Some wordplay led to extra letters; some omitted letters (potentially more than one per … Read more >>

Solving time: maybe 10 hours Many readers of crossword blogs will know by now that I had surgery on a brain tumour near the end of July. After taking a while to rebuild … Read more >>

I am not at all sure that I have got this puzzle right, as my solution to the final step does not seem to meet all the criteria that I would expect it … Read more >>

Good stuff from Schadenfreude. Educational too! I spotted BARTHOLOMEW and hence the theme for the “complete set” early which made it fairly simple to fill in the most of the lights. The exception was … Read more >>

This was an oddly coincidental puzzle for me. I bought the paper on my way to Nottingham for an Open University residential school. I spent the week studying mathematical modelling and, in particular, … Read more >>

The preamble for this puzzle was fairly short, comprising only two sentences. We were told that eight unclued entries were all instances of the second half of 45 across. One of the instances … Read more >>

 Loved this puzzle! Great stuff from Lato. I (HI) can’t take much credit for solving it though. A weekend’s windsurfing left me exhausted physically and in no state mentally to tackle some very … Read more >>

A fairly light puzzle from Quixote this week, though I don’t mean that in a bad way. I worked through the puzzle very quickly, for me, getting stuck on just one of the … Read more >>

Anyone for tennis?  This puzzle was published on Ladies Finals Day at Wimbledon. We were told that 14 of the 44 clues contained a misprint with the correct letters spelling out the topical … Read more >>

This was a fairly gentle puzzle from Schadenfreude – the challenge was to idenitfy the empty cells where the cause and effect were to be entered, “thus thwarting an attempt to save the … Read more >>

We were told that the answers to five across clues had to be jumbled before entry. To complicate matters further, we were also told that the letters in these five answers would share … Read more >>

Easy to solve the grid (with some rather underwhelming clues), much harder to find the phrase made up of the extra letters. The phrase was almost irrelevant in terms of completing and sending … Read more >>

The clue is in the title, “Up, up and away” …in my beautiful balloon. A song probably known to many of my contemporaries as the music from the Nimble advert. Nimble was a … Read more >>

Excellent puzzle based on James Bond villains on the centenary of the birth of Ian Fleming, with some inventive and amusing clues. Once I’d twigged that we were looking at SCARAMANGA (which led … Read more >>