Crossword editor’s desk: April fooling is alive and well in crosswords

Cryptic crossword setters are still finding new ways to celebrate April Fools’ Day It’s April, so it’s time to continue our tracking of the ebb and flow of April foolery in crossword puzzles. In brief, the good times continue. I haven’t yet found any cryptics of the rule-bending variety, but, avoiding spoilers, would like to recommend the Financial Times puzzle by the setter known locally as Harpo, navigating to Independent 12,318 by the solver known locally as Enigmatist and our own Paul here at the Guardian. On the other side of the Atlantic, the New York Times occasionally breaks an amusing quotation over longer entries, clued “Quip, part 1” and so on, the solver using crossing letters to piece together the witticism. It appeared that Wednesday’s was one of those, except that adding together the entries did not create anything especially quotable … double quotation markQUICK START YOUNG AT HEART SECOND LINE PAY UP FRONT … so it takes a moment to see how these give a QUIP in a way that we see more often on this side of the water. Here’s the solution for Turnstone’s crafty Genius, which asked the solver to move letters between across and down clues, generatin

Apr 7, 2026 → Apr 7, 2026