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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A blog that takes a look at the highlights from the week’s cryptics, and some of the puzzles coming up this weekend.
Clues of the weekend
The weekend features the FT’s monthly news puzzle, featuring clues and solutions based on the events of topics of April. And no surprise that Julius, the setter, has visited Trumpland for inspiration. Here’s a container clue, with the relevant container items in bold —
Trump is to licence carrying a gun (6)
And here’s an anagrammatic clue about the Pentagon leak —
Edit lines dodgily to hide name, as The Atlantic’s editor did (8,2)
A nice and straightforward (hopefully) start to Rosa Klebb’s Saturday puzzle at 1 Across —
Feeling dejected, cat bites leg (6)
In need of inspiration? Think of three-letter words for ‘cat’ and ‘leg’, then get the first of those to ‘bite’ the second.
And here’s one of Rosa Klebb’s straightforward synonym clues —
Slight mumble (4)
Gozo is this weekend’s Polymath setter. Test your general knowledge of, among other things, the Beckhams, Greek gods, cocktails, Cardiff City FC and this tricky one —
Solid figure with nine plane faces (11)
How to solve
In Goliath’s puzzle on Wednesday is this clue —
Commercial division off course (6)
‘Commercial’ = ad(vert)
Another word for ‘division’ = rift
Put those together and you get another term for off course — ADRIFT
Jason on Tuesday came up with a simple anagram —
Fruit aren’t nice cooked (9)
‘Cooked’ tells us to look for an anagram.
Rearrange ‘aren’t nice’ and you get
NECTARINE
Word of the week
In Guy’s Thursday puzzle —
Fellow that was silly held up to ridicule (5)
A word for ‘that was silly’ is oops. ‘Held up’, you get spoo. Add that to F (for ‘fellow’) and you get a word for ridicule —
SPOOF
Spoof was originally a card game invented in the late 19th Century by Arthur Roberts, an English music hall comedian (who had a hit with “Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow Wow”). The game involved bluff, and entered common parlance to come to mean trickery and nonsense.
From the FT Style Guide
prefixes
Should be hyphenated if the word following is capitalised (anti-American) or if it starts with the same vowel (anti-inflationary); otherwise it is usually one word (antitrust) unless the word is then over-long (antigovernment, anticorruption). In these instance a hyphen should be used.
To access the FT’s Cryptic, Polymath and FT Weekend crosswords, go to https://www.ft.com/puzzles-games or solve them on the iOS and Android apps.
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