collaborated in murdering the poor old man, having first taken care to provide themselves with carefully interlocking alibis – like a silly novel I once read. Biography: The Guardian is an award-winning British newspaper that consistently rates as the most-trusted newspaper in the country.

I’m reeling them off at random: peculiar, diplomacy, courtesan, furnished, viscount, squander, sunlight, chasuble, clergyman, luminary, thousand, poverty, cherubim, treason, cabriolet, rheumatics, apostle, costumier, viaduct. Now is your chance to entertain yourself with these quick crosswords from the Guardian's extensive archives, with the first book in the new Guardian puzzle book series.Finally, you’ve moved to Ditchling , which in my head is identical to Itching Down – the locale of one of literature’s greatest books, The Giant Jam Sandwich. I do have a favourite pen: the Pilot G-Tec-C4, which makes an accurate line and allows for ludicrously small writing. In it, I tell the story behind the development of each crossword: how I thought of the theme, the ideas that didn’t made it into print and the unlikely connections that emerged afterwards. There’s something oddly organic about Grid 61, which I think of as having a black twig across the middle of the grid, and I like all the grids that make geometric shapes.

The most rewarding themes have the tightest focus: early on, I started a list of ideas based on fruit and veg, but quickly found that I had enough vegetable clues, so I put the fruit on one side. An unambiguously funny passage is Mr Stimpson’s attempt – “grimly determined not to surrender” – to solve a crossword (or, as he thinks of them, “one of the beastly things”). I just want to avoid anything trivially easy, but not ridiculously hard either (and certainly not cryptic! I don’t think there are any valid anagrams that work at 19 across, which is perhaps a sign of the state of Mr Stimpson’s mind. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.I can’t sit down with a blank sheet of paper and know that in two or three hours I’ll have a puzzle, and I won’t start one until I know that I have at least three or four ideas for clues that will establish a theme. May have some underlining and highlighting of text and some writing in the margins, but there are no missing pages or anything else that would compromise the readability or legibility of the text. So also are Mr Stimpson’s Crossword Puzzles, the clues to which the reader is advised not to be beguiled into attempting to solve. At the Observer, Ximenes took over from Torquemada and applied discipline (“playing the game”) to assist the solver. When Have His Carcase was published, the crossword was a novelty; the Guardian had had a puzzle for just three years.

So the reader gets a pleasingly lengthy description of how a Playfair code encodes letters in pairs, which means that an E, for example, might be represented by a different letter each time, which means that someone trying to decode the message can’t look for the letter which appears most often and work on the basis that it’s probably an E … and so on.More fool the adapters: the conversation could only have been more delightful if our heroes had digressed into discussing Playfair’s creator, Charles Wheatstone, who also found time to invent the English concertina and an electronic device that went on to be a key aspect of Scientology. Fifty more puzzles from the Guardian and an additional five bonus puzzles previously only available online, including the notorious Referendum Day puzzle that was able to predict the result of the UK’s vote over its membership of the European Union with complete confidence. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. Boatman’s puzzles are witty and ingenious – and he never forgets that his job is to delight the solver.

I'd like to get a crossword puzzle book for my boyfriend for Christmas: he often does the guardian crossword/ enjoys word puzzles in general. Seller has stated it will dispatch the item within 1 working day upon receipt of cleared payment - opens in a new window or tab . The notes on your 96th puzzle include the unlikely phrase “This is the last fish-based puzzle in this collection”. It’s a quick-crossword version of Victor Meldrew’s attempt to solve a baffling cryptic, which we have looked at here. When at last we find the important coded message in Have His Carcase, Lord Peter Wimsey delegates the decoding to the whodunnit novelist with whom he has spent much of the story flirting.With a wide variety of clues from a vast range of subjects, these crosswords will provide a stern examination of your lexical knowledge, but are concise enough to be solved in bite-sized chunks. Like the maps of a cathedral close that we are given near the beginning, the puzzle takes up most of various pages while a canon and a reverend execute an admirably protracted solve. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. As addictively enjoyable as they are compulsively difficult, get ready for hours of fun with these high-quality puzzles. We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers.