Celebrating 100 years of the crossword

Mr James timed his to boiling an egg, Bill Clinton did his on Air Force One and they make John Humphrys cross. On the 100th anniversary of the crossword, Alan Connor argues that cryptics are easier than quicks

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• • Alan Connor
  • The Guardian, Friday 8 November 2013 

Brigitte Bardot gets her thinking cap on. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Getty Images

Earlier this year, John Humphrys gasped an incredulous "No!" at the idea that cryptic crosswords are easier than those we call quicks. John Henderson, known as Enigmatist to the Guardian solvers he has been teasing since 1979, told the Today presenter that he had spent three times as long on that morning's quick than he had on the full-fat cryptic. Humphrys was flabbergasted – and not a little defensive. The counterintuitive claim confirmed his fear that there are those whose brains are suited to cryptic wordplay – and that he will never be among them.

His suspicion is understandable. The cryptic solver is often depicted as having otherworldly intelligence – Inspector Morse finding inspiration for a murder case from a tricky acrostic, or George Smiley's MI5 colleague Connie Sachs filling in the Times's puzzle with an ink pen. In real life, the cryptic fan is more like the beleaguered commuter struggling with a clue in Madness's single Cardiac Arrest – an everyman who can't quite face the "news" part of the newspaper. Still, the sceptic wonders: those freakish sentences – "Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating", say – surely the cryptic is inherently more baffling, more time-consuming, more arduous than its quick counterpart?
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