Even though he only provided conventional blocked puzzles once a week for the Observer Everyman series for about two years his strong views on clueing, expressed in his 1966 book, have been a source of debate in the cryptic crossword world ever since.

[2] The historian Norman Longmate wrote that he was the "James Boyer of his day, a notable teacher of the classics, respected, even liked, by his older pupils, dreaded by the younger boys, a bully and a brute".

Macnutt selected the name Ximenes after Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, one of Torquemada's successors as Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.

[5][6] His crossword style was initially in imitation of Torquemada,[1] but was soon influenced by the inventive puzzles of Alistair Ferguson Ritchie who wrote as Afrit in The Listener.

More importantly, he insisted that all clues must be scrupulously fair via rules that were summed up by his successor, Azed, as: He made a number of innovations in crossword setting such as the special clue/puzzle types 'Misprints' and 'Right and Left'.