Fifteensquared

I looked at the blog of the previous Everyman and someone was saying what fun this was. Whether it was great fun I’m not sure, partly because I found it very hard, with two problems caused by my entering the wrong letters and trying to think of a cocktail whose first word was D_S, and later failing utterly on 13 down and being totally unable to make head or tail of it until I realised that the sausage was a chorizo not a choriza. There are some quite nice clues here, but the old days of a simple but sound crossword that was a gateway for beginners seem to be in the past. I wonder if we will ever return to them.

And I also looked at the blog of the one before that, which was criticised by several people. Two regular setters from several other papers dropped in to the comments and one of them said ‘Sorry to have to say, but this really is just bottom-of-the-heap Guardian stuff, and a far cry from the craftsmanship we once knew.’ I don’t think this one was so dreadful — there are probably a few setters of The Everyman — but the elegant surfaces and penny-drop moments that one gets from various other crosswords were still largely absent.

Definitions in crimson. Indicators (hidden, anagram, reversal etc) in italics. Anagrams are indicated (like this)*, or possibly *(like this), depending on whether the indicator comes before or after the letters to be jumbled.

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