Naturally it feels a little old-fashioned, having been written in the ’70s, but the essentials of it are just as helpful now as they were then. Robins’ prose style is fairly formal, with longish sentences, but still eminently readable and actually quite refreshing in contrast to the chatty familiarity of today's manuals. (Here's a typical sentence by way of example: 'Before we proceed, therefore, to bring into play any of the clueing devices described later, let us be quite sure that we understand what constitutes unsoundness, so that we may avoid being guilty of the same abuses of language, grammar and allied topics in our own work.')

The largest section comprises a comprehensive run-down of cryptic crossword clue types with examples and explanations, noting all along the way what's fair and what isn't, and reminding the aspiring setter to aim for fairness, precision and entertainment value. This is followed by a tutorial in grid-filling, that perhaps is less relevant now that setters have all the word-lists of compiling software at their disposal and are not so reliant on their own vocabularies, but still has handy things to say about grid construction and the ORDER of filling in the words.

A third section brings the two disciplines together and writes a suite of clues for a complete puzzle, reminding us along the way to keep track of the proportion of clue types used, and to employ as healthy a variety of them as possible, to prevent the solver feeling anagram-saturated or short-changed by too many easy hiddens, etc. ( )