The British daily paper of record, The Times, has become the first in England to weigh in on Matching Minds, which was released overseas last Thursday. I am both thoroughly delighted and also not surprised that it appeared as the lead article in their Sunday Times newsletter (thank you puzzle editor Mick Hodgkin!). “Famous puzzler of wild hedonism,” begins the title, with a playful nod to one of many anagrams for Sondheim, and continues:

The late Stephen Sondheim holds a special place among the ranks of celebrity crossword aficionados. The composer and lyricist somehow found time in between writing multiple award-winning musicals to tackle, and to compile, some of the most fiendish crosswords invented.

I met Sondheim once at an Azed crossword lunch. He was as charming and quick-witted as you might expect, and he signed my copy of the script for West Side Story, which we performed when I was in the Sixth Form (I was a rather improbable Chino). I had no idea then that he and Leonard Bernstein regularly halted work on the show while they tackled the Listener Crossword.

Sondheim was dismissive of most American crosswords and helped to spread interest in the British cryptic among US solvers. As well as solving the Listener for many years (before it moved to The Times) he competed in the Azed clue-writing contest and corresponded with a number of UK solvers.

I have been discovering much more about this fascinating man in Barry Joseph’s book Matching Minds with Sondheim (Bloomsbury), out this month. As well as crosswords and logic puzzles he was a great lover of board games, treasure hunts and parlour games, creating a murder game that he played with friends including Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Roddy McDowall and Lee Remick. This game became the basis of his only screenplay, for a 1973 film called The Last of Sheila, co-written with Anthony Perkins. This in turn helped to inspire the Knives Out series, particularly Glass Onion (2022) in which Sondheim had a cameo.

I could go on but there is so much more. If you are as interested in all this as I am, do read the book.

*The answer to the clue in the headline is SONDHEIM. He took great satisfaction from his surname being an anagram of “hedonism”.