Azed

Now that many crossword devotees have bought Jonathan Crowther’s book, Collins have decided to remainder it. It is now available for the knock-down price of £5.99 from the online, high quality, remainder bookshop … Read more >>

I must confess that my heart sank when I saw the special instructions for this puzzle, but in the end it turned out to be only a little more difficult than usual. For … Read more >>

A pretty good Azed this week — it took a while to solve, because the surface reading in some clues was nicely deceptive. As for me, a seriously painful dental infection has hampered … Read more >>

Having confined myself to a strict diet of The Listener over the last few months (and at the other end of the spectrum, the Times2 crossword), it was refreshing to solve a puzzle … Read more >>

In Azed’s crosswords there is always an enormous amount of Chambers-checking meanings of words. If this blog were to contain all the unusual definitions it would be three times as long. I’ll assume … Read more >>

I’ll be back a bit later today with the blog on this puzzle.

Solving time 43:08, Chambers used when grid about half full – but one probable wrong answer. A fairly straightforward puzzle I think – took about half as long as Mephisto. In my current … Read more >>

Printer’s Devilry puzzles are an interesting and enjoyable change that Azed produces from time to time. I thought we’d had one fairly recently – it turns out I was thinking of the 2007 … Read more >>

A more demanding puzzle than some of Azed’s recent ones; and, to me, all the better for that. As usual, I learnt a few new words, though I’m not sure when I’ll ever … Read more >>

Solving time : about a day (but it was my birthday, so I was distracted).  Loads of unfamiliar words this week, and some excellent surface readings (e.g. 19 across).  I found the south-west … Read more >>

I managed to solve most of this one while multi-tasking at Lord’s last Sunday (otherwise known as looking up each time an England bowler sent down a delivery which failed to take a … Read more >>

At first I found this fairly easy going – in particular, several rather obvious anagrams (34, 28, 20…) were my way in, so that I swiftly filled in the bottom half. I was … Read more >>

Some nice clues, but – dare I say it – one or two whose surfaces are pretty vacuous. As usual, I’m afraid. Azed has produced some wonderful stuff over the years, but nowadays … Read more >>

This was probably Azed at his toughest and I am grateful to Peter B and the Cryptonuts for helping fill-in my gaps. First things first. As with all out-of-the ordinary puzzles, read and … Read more >>

I offered to do this blog, then discovered that I had thrown out my copy of the solution, which doesn’t yet appear to be available on the Guardian/Observer website, so I had to … Read more >>