Julian Morgan rightly styles himself as an emeritus aenigmatifix (although I would rather go along with Sidonius Apollinaris’ aenigmatista).
The book contains 100 puzzles with the preface, the clues and the rubrics for all the puzzles in Latin. In fact the only item in the whole book not in Latin is the ISBN number! Converting that to a Roman numeral might well be beyond the powers of even Mr Morgan!
The puzzles are nicely varied, ingenious and contain such headings, inter alia, as verba transversa, sagittae, novomnia and coniunctis quaerendis. Some are suitable for that rainy Friday afternoon with Year 9 (e.g. Quaerenda:Scriptores – a wordsearch with the Roman authors’ names supplied) while others are more demanding in their knowledge of vocabulary and case endings. I particularly enjoyed number XXVII (Clara Numerata) where the answers (sorry, the resolutiones) are all structures or parts of structures likely to be known to GCSE students (e.g. templum, amphitheatrum, thermae).
The solutions to all the puzzles are given and the book seems an ideal resource for those unexpectedly given more leisure time by present (and future?) occurrences.
Open access
