Excellent challenge beautifully constructed. Shirley Curran is always good value as a setter. Fortunately for us G spotted the quotation very early on, which helped significantly.
A skilful implementation of a delightful theme. I found the clues incredibly tough, especially where clashes were involved, and spent almost as long getting the last few answers as I did on the rest...
Nice theme and some excellent clues but the jumbled entries, combined with a serious amount of guess-and-search for the outer ring, made for far too much cold solving for my liking. If it had been...
Have finished this more or less and very fine it is too - except that I'm left with several ambiguous cells and no indication that I can see on how to resolve this. The subject of line 2 also eludes...
After last week's Sabre I was expecting something simple - wrong! Was head scratching and cold solving for ages until I rumbled the verse and then had the huge PDM. Thought the 18 opposing pairs were...
After last week's rather harsh welcome home from holiday (perhaps I should have taken two weeks), this was much smoother and more welcome. An interesting mixture of clues, some less obvious to me than...
This is curious. All done, all seems OK ... and yet I am a letter out in the endgame. I'll assume that I have made a small error. Perversely, I hope that I have and that there isn't a problem here....
After being too tired to make much progress on this last night, I made the most of a delayed flight this morning and got there in the end (in both senses!). This was a clever construction, with mostly...
I shuddered when I saw the name of the setter and I was totally wrong. This puzzle is extremely approachable and I felt that the clues were very generous at times. A newcomer should not be afraid of...
I haven't been able to find another thread so here goes ... I thought this was quite a straightforward offering this week; the clues didn't take too long to solve. There will be some argument about...
Normally I'm a bit wary of circular grids, but with some fortunate early clue solves I stumbled on the theme, including all of the message from the hidden letters. It's an understatement to say that...
This was quite tricky to make progress with lots of cold-solving required, but the penny dropped in about three stages with a final satisfying clang. Another puzzle contributing to the high quality of...
A clever treatment of, for me, an unfamiliar theme. It's scarcely possible to believe that the letter changes in the grid can exist and give the required text. I really liked several of the across...
A fairly gentle workout after the rigours of the last weeks but highly enjoyable nonetheless. Steady progress by trial and error after the first grid entry leads to a neat endgame. Many thanks to...
After several days in bed with very nasty flu I wasn't on best form to tackle one of the most challenging setters in the business, but lucky guesses and a series of PDMs made this an enjoyable journey...
An entertaining puzzle, using a mix of familiar cryptic techniques. We were perhaps fortunate in identifying the run of correct letters after solving about a dozen or so clues.