The European countries of which these are the capitals begin with A, B, C, … Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary. C. Auguste Dupin was a fictional detective created by Edgar Allen Poe (a); ‘he would, wouldn’t he’ was said of Lord Astor by Mandy Rice-Davies (b) prandial nudity is a Naked Lunch, a novel by William Seward Burroughs (c). Each word contains a 3-letter tree: FIRm, hELM, sOAK, wASH, but only in FIRM is the tree at the beginning. The answers are: BAKING POWDER, FLYING SAUCER, JACK-IN-THE-BOX, MOTHERS-IN-LAW, NOTARY PUBLIC, PANTY GIRDLES, PLASTIC MONEY, PLAYS FOR TIME, PLOUGHED BACK, QUESTION MARK, SHADOW FIGURE, STAYING POWER.

Two solutions depending on whether the element/planet at 4 down is chosen to be Mercury or Krypton (the home planet of Superman). d) The Sign of Four (Arthur Conan Doyle) - Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. f) CAN VAS, FLASK S, FLORI ST, I MA GO, MA INLAND, MA UVE, OR IG IN, TE ENS, V ARM INT, ZOOMING become US states when 2 letters are changed: CONNECTI ONS requires 3 letters to be changed.They precede things you might find in an orchestra: ear DRUM, champagne FLUTE, shoe HORN, Bermuda TRIANGLE, ear TRUMPET and super CONDUCTOR. TEMPERATE, WINDS all appear in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’): SUMMARY doesn’t.

The initial letters of these characters’ names form the question ‘WHAT LINKS THEM’ to which the answer is the previous sentence. William HARTnell (1 st Doctor), Patrick trOUGHTon (2 nd Doctor), Jon perTWEE (3 rd Doctor), (Tom and Colin) BAKEr (4 th and 6 thDoctors), Sylvester mcCOY (7 th Doctor). EIGHTY ONE has 9 letters, 9 2=81, ONE HUNDRED has 10 letters 10 2=100, FIVE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX has 24 letters, 24 2=576. For over one hundred years, GCHQ (or the Government Communications Headquarters) have worked in secret to gather information and solve the toughest of problems to help keep the people of the UK safe and secure.h) BUtterfield Eight (John O’Hara) - On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before.

Each author has written a book (or in one case a poem) with a title containing a character’s first name but no last name. j) Ten Days That Shook the World (John Reed) - Towards the end of September 1917, an alien professor of Sociology visiting Russia came to see me in Petrograd. g) CHAIN/CHINA, ENEMY/YEMEN, MOAN/OMAN, PLANE/NEPAL, REGALIA/ALGERIA, REIGN/NIGER, SERIAL/ISRAEL are all anagrams of countries: ANIMAL/MANILA is the anagram of a capital city. e. they are formed from one of ADGJMPSVY, BEHKNQTWZ or CFILORUX): in GASEOUS letters come from all 3 groups. The list is the Roman numerals I, II, III, …, (part of) XXI with I, V, X replaced by 1, 5, 10 respectively.

The answers to a-h are eight trigraphs, using 24 of the 26 letters of the alphabet, with N and Y left over. Apocrifal must have scored 64-20-9=35 against Dewbius (as Dewbius had 64 points against them), therefore they scored 83-8-35=40 against Beaugas. e) IDEA: all have rhyming synonyms, but IDEA’s ends in -OUGHT, not -ORT: CASTLE/FORT, DEATH/MORT, HARBOUR/PORT, IDEA/THOUGHT, LITTLE/SHORT, RECREATION/SPORT, TYPE/SORT, WRONG/TORT. Altered images; jumble sale; change of pace; change of heart; times are a-changing; regime change; change of name; redirected mail; small change; Eton mess; mixed emotions; mixed up in something. All the other dates fall on the same day of the week (Monday in 2016); it always falls on a different day (Tuesday in 2016).