Foreign News: The Crossword King

The British newspaper reader, like his American cousin, is an avid crossword-puzzle fan, but Britain's puzzles are as different from those in the U.S. as chess is from checkers. Most U.S. puzzles give clues that are at best merely obscure, e.g., "a device to fill the lower pane of a painted window" in six letters.† British fans expect their clues to be witty, ingenious, arch and wildly erudite.

Far & away the most ingenious of all British puzzle "setters" is a Sussex schoolmaster named Derrick Somerset Macnutt, whose crosswords appear each fortnight in London's Sunday Observer under the byline Ximenes (a Cardinal...