James Brydon wrote this guide in this month’s FT News Puzzle about the steamy account of the French economy minister American fugue:
Burn Molière plays an erotic writer (5,2,5)*
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the answer to fit in the grid,” James, under whose handles the puzzle was published to the Financial Times hacker, today. “I was so sad to have to drop any sign of it.”
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Nor could he work on mysteries such as losing listeners to the BBC’s Today programme, Belgium’s Luca Bressel winning the World Snooker Championship or Boris and Carrie Johnson expecting their third child.
But there was plenty of other material that made the net – led by the inauguration of a British monarch including the Eurovision Song Festival. Not for the first time in the series of mysteries, the royal feud appears, as does the UK’s economic troubles, the legal battles of a former US president and the controversies surrounding British government ministers.
“I’m far from a news junkie, so I spent some time Googling May News, trying to come up with as broad a list of potential items as possible,” Brydon says. “Tragic news stories don’t do well in crosswords, so I looked for moments of cultural significance, or the sufferings of the powerful and their practices that seemed ripe for satirical allusion.”
Writing crossword clues consists of seeing the possibility of wordplay ideas hidden in the words, according to Bredon.
Here, several news ideas emerged from the words that were used to populate the net on core topic ideas. References to Elon Musk’s Starship Project, Wills and Harry Quarrels, the recent series of Succession, or the uproar over the sixth year of the SATs (which my daughter took this year), were not on my original list, but grew naturally from the letter combinations of the grid, allowing the news topics to fill in as many clues and solutions as possible. “
The monthly FT News puzzle can be found at ft.com/crosswordapp
* Bruno Le Maire (anagram of Berne Moliere)