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The Wiki Man

Cryptic crosswords are hard – but so is life

2 December 2023

9:00 AM

2 December 2023

9:00 AM

As regular readers will know, I am an inveterate fan of cryptic crosswords. At the everyday level, they are the perfect way to kill 20-50 minutes of otherwise boring time. There is a refined elegance to clue-setting: the best are little works of art. Crossword-solving also cultivates the useful talent of looking beneath the clue’s explicit surface meaning to the meaning lurking beneath – which trains solvers in the essential creative act of seeing the same thing from different perspectives.

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