Puzzles February 2026

1 Male TV rival destroyed a little piece of your heart (6,5)
9 Camp bed placed next to Great Lake (7)
10 See 11a
11,10 Frank, heed ﬁrstly these swell lines describing a life-saving operation (4,5,7)
12 Pays my rent, making regular losses up until now (2,3)
13 Similar to relish (4)
14 Interfering in reported prize total (10)
16 Little boy, for example, needing minute with mine (6,4)
19 Charge a levy for one means of transport (4)
20 Musk possesses this amount of magnetic ﬁeld strength (5)
21 How most of us are informed of church service methodologies (4,5)
23 Roger tucks into chopped herbs for antelopes (7)
24 Everyone clutches chasers of cognac too harsh to drink (7)
25 Maybe he's Cain? (5,6)

1 Majority accepting the berk's own weirdly maternal warning (6,5,4)
2 Light components of cabinet or chair (5)
3 Brilliant gallery displaying artiﬁcial ﬁbre (7)
4 Take a seat in terrible dive and get patronised (7)
5 Wearing a mask in quirky travel ad (8)
6 Sometimes all at once as well as afterwards (5,3,3,4)
7 The classroom's degenerated according to many of these (13)
8 Thinly set clay manufactured using man-made processes (13) 15 European capital gets into baked pasta (8)
17 Lost opening segments of Bad Education movie getting recycled (7)
18 Mother's savvy - there's the rub! (7)
22 Phlegm brought up with endless fuss (5)