For many years The Times crossword appeared in Jumbo form as a Bank Holiday treat, six times a year, and from 1993 I have been producing a Times2 version to appear beside it. To create this, I would receive the grid from the compiler, as many weeks in advance as I could obtain it, and then have the enjoyable challenge of completing it with a different set of words – always difficult because of the open quality of the typical Times pattern with its long, interconnected phrases and its minimal use of short words and black squares.
Recently the Times cryptic compiling team has been producing a Jumbo each week, and although being single-handed I could not produce a Times 2 version for each, we doubled the frequency to twelve a year by appearing twice over each Bank Holiday weekend. As a result, we have now published enough puzzles to be able to bring to you this collection of the first sixty.
The puzzles appear exactly as they were printed, apart from the replacement of a few topical clues; and I have also corrected the remarkable clue that somehow found its way into puzzle 56 as “Husband of Philip II”.
There is just one puzzle in this book not by me: one year I had ‘flu when The Times made a late decision to print an extra Jumbo, so my cryptic colleagues helped out by producing that puzzle in Times 2 style. If they succeeded, you will be unable to tell which of these sixty it is.
These puzzles are intended to be exactly the same type as the normal daily puzzle in The Times, with the same mixture of reasonably challenging but not too recondite words and references; indeed, I find it the most enjoyable challenge of all my Times2 work to overcome the exigencies of the Jumbo grid pattern without resorting to unfairness or obscurity. I hope they give you as much pleasure to solve as they gave me to compile, and that you will need minimal recourse to the solutions printed at the back.
Richard Browne
Times2 Editor
