Life
Solution to 2514: Welcome Back
Unclued lights were stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. (The Adventures of the: EMPTY (41) HOUSE (2), DANCING MEN…
The Battle for Britain
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Tried and tested
Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends.…
Dear Mary
Q. Passing Buckingham Palace in a taxi the other day, I saw the ceremonial wing of the Household Division prancing…
Low life
I was shown to a room divided into three cubicles, each with a reclining chair and bed table. In the…
Real life
The doctor’s receptionist was adamant. ‘If you had not had the vaccine you would have been even more ill with…
Wild life
Nairobi Since my father first caught sight of Mombasa from his ship in late 1929, at least some of my…
Holland
The title of the keenly awaited volume of memoirs by John Martin Robinson sounds like a crossword clue: Holland Blind…
A Rhine art
In an apparently benign — almost prelapsarian — setting, the Rhine is an epitome of the human condition. Scenery is…
Signal failure
Why does virtue-signalling matter? It’s a fair question. After all, if people display virtuous behaviour, need we care about their…
Bridge
When I started learning bridge (about 20 years ago) I was taught the basic guidelines of play and defence and…
High life
Isle of Patmos Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks who had occupied…
Aussie Life
It used to be that sporting endeavour was regarded as a noble cause, and that our sporting pastimes were governed…
Aussie Language
Talking to Peta Credlin on Sky News I coined a new expression, ‘language communists’. I used to call the bullies…
The Battle for Britain
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Damascene moment
Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is an eyrie off Carnaby Street, a once-famous road which seems to exist nowadays to sell trainers…
Can the Lions prise open the strong Boks?
You would need a digger to explore the levels of irony in a Springbok chief slagging off an opponent’s dirty…
Dear Mary
Q. My beloved wife has been studying Chinese metaphysics for 18 months. Our house and garden have been badly neglected…
Leather and prunella
‘Oh, yes,’ said my husband, enthusiastically, ‘a loathsome disease. The tongue goes black and dry.’ He was referring to an…
Knee-jerk reactions
Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB…
Bridge
Bridge is a game you can never fully master, which is why it’s so endlessly stimulating. No sooner have you…
Puzzle No. 663
White to play. A variation from Grandelius – Xiong, Fide World Cup, Sochi 2021. With an accurate queen check,White can…
2516: Such childish vocabulary
The nouns from the first sentence of a book (in the ODQ) appear as unclued lights — apart from two.…
Solution to 2513: Golden anniversary
The announcement reads: ‘Fifty years ago, on July the third, Jac’s first crossword in this series was published.’ The shaded…
Kasparov’s tailspin
In a game between top players, the opening moves signify not only the battleground they have embraced, but also the…
