The Guardian Quick Crosswords 1: A collection of more than 200 entertaining puzzles (Guardian Puzzle Books)

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I’m sure that the symmetries and patterns in the best grids are part of the appeal of crosswords and add to the solver’s motivation to complete a puzzle. If you add in three drink-based puzzles and eight with some other type of food, that would make 16 puzzles with food-and-drink themes, which rather echoes your experience. The notes on your 96th puzzle include the unlikely phrase “This is the last fish-based puzzle in this collection”. 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. The Guardian is an award-winning British newspaper that consistently rates as the most-trusted newspaper in the country.

In this book, you’ll find my first 50 puzzles from the Guardian, with an additional bonus puzzle first published in the online Genius slot. Grids 54A and 54B (the ones with the Ss) have a preponderance of shorter lights, which matches the type of words that I like to clue, as does Grid 58 (the one with the Ws). 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.

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.

Itching Down is recognisably Ditching in many places, though John inserted several parts of other villages that he enjoyed drawing. I have a lot of admiration for the more prolific setters like Paul and (in their day) Araucaria and Rufus. You seem to treat the various Guardian grids like physical spaces, like your metaphor of the Cluedo secret passageway. When Have His Carcase was published, the crossword was a novelty; the Guardian had had a puzzle for just three years. 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.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. Boatman’s puzzles are witty and ingenious – and he never forgets that his job is to delight the solver.

Michael Gilbert himself, and Close Quarters in particular, belong to neither the “cosy crime” nor the “hard-boiled” camp. We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers.A solicitor, he worked at Lincoln’s Inn and enjoyed writing amid the “hustle and bustle” of his commute. An image of seaside rock no doubt entered my subconscious, because two puzzles about types of rock emerged much later. Since those characters are either irredeemably sadistic or hopelessly foolish, the reader needs to be in the right mood. 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. 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.