Life
2458: Bardicarum
The unclued Across lights are of a kind, as are the associated Down ones. Across 1 Friendship revealed by American…
Low life
The most visible local landmark is a solitary two-headed Jurassic mountain called Le Bessillon, six miles long and 800 metres…
Dear Mary
Q. My goddaughter was getting married in July but due to Covid-19 this has been postponed. I had already chosen…
Puzzle no. 605
White mates in two moves against any defence (composed by Walter Pulitzer). Steinitz admitted he could not crack this within…
Only the worst will survive
What does a critic do when her genre collapses? Mostly I panic. I speak to restaurateurs who believe that without…
Real life
When people ask me what I did during lockdown, I would like to give an inspiring answer, apart from growing…
The Battle for Britain
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When actions speak louder than words
For all the abuse heaped on the Behavioural Insights Team early in the crisis, let’s not forget that the only…
Solution to 2455: Shadow boxing
The unclued lights are the four Labour MPs who stood for election as Labour’s leader to succeed Jeremy Corbyn: 11,…
Lockdown lit
In Competition No. 3149 you were invited to tweak an existing book or poem title for lockdown and provide an…
Steinitz Memorial
I like a memorial tournament. It’s true that the champions they celebrate may be less skilled than their modern counterparts.…
High life
Gstaad The staff are back and all is well, as they used to say long ago in faraway places. The…
Puzzle no. 604
Aronian–Vidit, Online Nations Cup, May 2020. Vidit has just captured axb3 en passant. Aronian’s next move revealed a powerful concept.…
High life
Gstaad Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’…
Low life
France is divided into a red zone and a green zone. We’re green. Green for go. From this morning we…
Real life
If this lockdown doesn’t end soon we are all going to turn into hairy lefties. I have just cut the…
Lockdown may kill me
I have a new job, which is maintaining a website called Lockdown Sceptics (lockdownsceptics.org). It’s a compendium of evidence that…
Dear Mary
Q. For me the hallmark of a really close friend is someone with whom you feel comfortable enough to bring…
Wine to lock down
I was once invited to the Cheltenham races and found the experience underwhelming. Everything was too respectable: not nearly Hibernian…
to 2454: 17 Across
The thirteen unclued lights are all breads, hence the puzzle’s real title at 17A. First prizeNicholas Grogan, Purley, Surrey Runners-up…
Bridge
My entertainment last week was watching the NN-Cup, a ‘Goulash’ tournament normally held in Moscow, now played online for the…
Have you caught the remote-working bug?
One of the few benefits to emerge from this pandemic is that the world’s population has been given a crash…
Floor
In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse…
Selfie
In Competition No. 3148 you were asked to imagine what the result might have been had a well-known writer slipped…
2457: Beginning
Unclued lights (including one of two words) suggest a section of a sequence whose final member will appear in the…
