Never knowingly undersolved
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, CD=cryptic def, DD=double def I got most of this done fairly quickly, but then got stuck on 1,2,10,17 and 21. Most of these involved obscure or unusual words. There … Read more >>
A surprise not to have Rufus this morning but I remember that, a while ago, Andrew came up with the lovely description of Rover as ‘Rufus-lite’. Some very easy anagrams and several cryptic … Read more >>
The luck of the draw is giving me all the Azed specials to blog these days. Right and Left is another one that comes up fairly regularly: I think the format was devised … Read more >>
Our first blog (as the The Trafites), and we look forward to doing this. A fairly straight forward Everyman this week. 25ac is unusual as we have seen RED RUM used for the … Read more >>
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition. Top stuff as always. I think I’ve managed to explain everything, but there’s a couple I’m a bit shaky on. Across 1 STICK INSECT – … Read more >>
Solving time: 13:44 This seemed about average difficulty for Paul, though I think I made heavy weather of it. As always there are some extremely inventive clues, and the lack of hyperlinks in … Read more >>
Before I solved 11ac it was hard to cope with all those clues that referred to it, but fairly soon that was all right, and there were no terribly obscure 11s. Although most … Read more >>
Fairly easy, pleasant puzzle today. I was briefly held up in the NE corner, I thought COLOGNE and BETEL were cleverly clued and it didn’t help to not know the two Lancs towns … Read more >>
*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition. Nestor’s puzzles are always good, and I doubt that this was an exception, but for some reason I couldn’t really get any momentum going here. … Read more >>
As ever, a very enjoyable puzzle from Pasquale. There were quite a few here where I had to guess that a word existed and then look it up (CERE, MANA, PICKABACK), but the … Read more >>
Oddly, my previous blog, and my final blog for the Inquisitor series, IQ 128, was an Obtrox puzzle. More oddly, it used exactly the same device: two extra letters from the wordplay in … Read more >>
Wow! Tremendous stuff from Loda! A puzzle with 20 across and 20 down clues where all the answers were 6 letter words corresponding to the balls in an over, using vowels as scoring … Read more >>
This felt like a tougher than average puzzle from Flimsy, although that impression may be influenced by the longest/quadrant-linking entries being particularly slow to come to me. Commiserations to the setter on having … Read more >>
Unusual puzzle. Got almost nothing on first run through. Then with three crossing letters saw what 8 was likely to be. After that made quite good progress, until getting badly stuck on 9. … Read more >>
A really enjoyable grid today, with a couple of royal references. There are some very clever clues in here, with distinctively misleading surfaces – I nearly stood up to applaud 20dn, it was … Read more >>