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A Clue to our Lives
Guardian Books, November 2008
This is a kind of companion piece to my other two crosswords books, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8)* and I Say Nothing (3)*.
“This is a lovely book, with an authoritative text and a judicious and quirky set of puzzles to solve... [It] deserves to become a classic.” Tom Johnson in 1 Across
This is what the blurb on the back says:
“The Guardian published its first crossword in 1929. Since then wars have come and gone. Economies have crashed and emperors fallen. The world has changed, almost beyond recognition, but the crossword remains, imperturbable, inscrutable, immutable. It is the least current of all the things that appear in a newspaper. It has the longest lead times and the least imperative to be ‘relevant’. Everything else in the paper is concerned with what has happened or is happening or is about to happen. The crossword is not. The crossword is about what is not happening. It is a magnificent folly in a forum of serious debate. And readers love it. For eighty years they have written to the paper to complain, to praise and to beg for more. In this wonderfully entertaining social history, Sandy Balfour traces the relationship this shows between a paper and its readers and those readers and their times.”
Order it from the Guardian or from Amazon.
* The solutions are REBELLED and EGO.
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