“That said, it would be overstating things to say that there has been a uniform Everyman style,” he has said. Setters have had their trademark quirks, but Connor believes the different eras of the puzzle “do have at least two things in common: a commitment to traditional cryptic grammar and an urge to be solvable – or, as they put it in the 1960s, ‘soluble’.” After that came the insurance man and keen golfer Allan Scott, and then the bookseller, biographer and history researcher Colin Gumbrell.

The line of succession that led directly down to him from Ximenes, real name Derrick Somerset Macnutt, includes “kindly classics teacher Alec Robins and tax office head Dorothy Taylor”. This would be a crossword that, in the words of Connor, “might be solved by the beginner, or the lapsed solver, or one who’s simply not prepared to comb through dictionaries for the answers”.Ĭonnor, who has occupied the Everyman seat for four years, only sets one regular newspaper crossword and has a day job writing scripts, books and working as the question editor on Richard Osman’s BBC TV quiz show, House of Games. And Everyman also owes it a debt of gratitude, because it was Azed’s predecessor, Ximenes, who came up with the idea for another cryptic companion. His brand of advanced puzzle, now compiled by only its third setter, Azed, is still posing tortuous but satisfying problems for devotees. This newspaper’s Torquemada set the pace. When the Observer first made space for a puzzle 97 years ago, a new era of problem solving was quickly under way, with the birth of the cryptic clue. Since then the appeal of this neat format of cleverly intersecting answers has withstood incursions from newfangled rivals such as Sudoku, or more recently Wordle, not to mention Candy Crush, so that it remains a favourite pastime for anyone with a love of words and a matching competitive streak.

There was an Everyman link to the BBC2 Inside No 9 episode The Riddle Of The Sphinx, which starred, from left, Reece Shearsmith, Alexandra Roach and Steve Pemberton.

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