Beelzebub 1,259

This seemed to be a solve of two halves for me. Progress was quite smooth until the last half dozen or so entries, whereby I had to hit the Chambers search pretty hard … Read more >>

AZED 2,185

The usual Azed, where the wordplay is so precise that you can often be pretty sure of the answers without knowing the words. I solved most of this when away for the weekend and came home with many unknown words written by the clues but not yet in the grid, ready for me to look them up in Chambers.

I thought that 19dn was very good, but my godson had a point when he opined that the ‘e.g.’ takes away from the surface reading. However, Azed (but not all setters, including some in The Times) clearly abhors a definition by example. And rightly so in my opinion.

Definitions in italics.

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Guardian 26,238 / Maskarade

I think this is the first time I’ve come up in the rotation to write the blog post about a big bank holiday puzzle, which is quite exciting. This was a themed puzzle … Read more >>

Financial Times 14,605 by BRADMAN

Tough day at work today so wasnt really in the right frame of mind to attack this puzzle. Nearly gave up before gutting it out. Thanks to Bradman for an excellent workout – I really loved doing this despite my less-than-ok frame of mind.

I had to get help from the internet for 7d but otherwise it was smooth sailing. Did need some assistance with parsing some clues though, which Geoff kindly helped with.

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