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Firstly, you must remember that the numerical answer does not go at the given clue. Secondly you need too find the simple starting point, and then the solution is remarkably linear. I did keep failing to remember the former point, and that did give me some serious red herrings, but all worked out well in the end.

I started it last night but had to leave it as my wine-addled brain would have made some daft mistakes. Just about to restart.
I prefer a purely numerical puzzle, not all this counting letters malarkey, but still a nice one.

Agreed, pretty straight forward once you work out how it works and keep remembering that the clue is what the letters add up to, not the entry itself.

Pleased to have knocked this off quite quickly having only finally stumbled over the line with the 12 letter jumbles from last week last night,

Nothing ruins my Saturday more than sitting down, opening the Review and finding it is time for a numerical puzzle. :(

*obvs this is because I never make any progress on them at all.

I’m with you on that laertes, I thought I’d have a go at this one but numbers clearly are not my forte.

I cannot even get a handle on this puzzle. I can see that there are three clues with G with different lengths and G is clued with a further differing length. So I suppose that G must have four different numbers describing it, or, indeed, possibly more general descriptions. Any hints to this, or, if I am going off on a wild goose chase, any ideas at all would be very welcome.

Hi, Casanova,

I started with A. This number has six letters, and there are only six possibilities, of which four can be quickly rejected because they finish with zero, and the answer to clue a can't start with a zero.

The alphabetic sum of the distinct letters (ASDL) is the answer to clue n. Calculate both ASDLs for the two possibilities for clue A, and you should find that only one of these has 10 letters when spelt out. Working out the ASDL for this number will give you the answer to clue G, and working out the ASDL for clue G will give you the answer to clue d, which in turn will give you the answer to clue F.

There's very little need for trial and error. It's useful to remember that three-digit numbers will include the string HUNDRED AND, which has 10 letters, so for example the answer to clue B, which has 16 letters, must begin with ONE, TWO or SIX and end with ONE, TWO or SIX (not TEN, which would make the answer to clue c begin with zero).

Hi Wintonian,

thanks for the help. I had followed the first two or three steps but I must have made an arithmetic error along the line. Anyway it is good to hear another’s thoughts and to know I haven’t missed any arcane feature of the puzzle.

I’ve been working on the lines outlined by wintonian but come unstuck when I get to b. I’ve got him indoors to check my sums as he’s more mathsy than me and he finds the same. I think the value I get for G must be too high but I can’t see where I’m going wrong.

I sympathise Laertes - for future reference you'll find they tend to come round (somewhat aptly) every 13 weeks.

As a maths dunce (failed O-level) I find MS Excel a huge help, and after an hour of building the spread-sheet I filled the puzzle in a slightly shorter timeframe. Even if you don't have Excel I'm sure similar products would do. You still need to understand the puzzle but the donkey work is done for you.