30 minutes for this one which came as something of a relief after the past couple of days when things started well but went downhill rapidly. I found it enjoyable if not particularly taxing and there were one or two really good clues amongst mainly solid stuff and a few that were too simple for words.
Across | |
---|---|
1 | VISITED – VI (Roman sex – 6) + SITE (position) + D (daughters) |
5 | COLOSSI – C (Conservative) + IS SOLO (reversed) |
9 | TOOK ISSUE – TOO (also) + K (a thousand) + ISSUE (children) |
10 |
NIGHT – NIGH (near) + |
11 | Hidden |
12 |
UGLY AS SIN – L |
13 | REINSTATEMENT – REIN (control) + STATEMENT (communiqué) |
17 |
HALE AND HEARTY – ALE (beer) inside HAND (sailor #1) + HEARTY (sailor #2). I really liked this one. Here’s a Noel Coward lyric:
Has anybody seen our ship? Heave ho, me hearties
|
21 | TRIUMVIRI – MUIR (Scottish moor reversed) inside TV (set) + IR (Irish) + 1. Another really good clue. It’s a sort of Roman coalition government. My last one in. |
24 |
TUTOR – T |
25 | HELEN – LE (French for ‘the’) inside HEN. The legendary Spartan. ‘Parisian’ is a bit cheeky but rather fun! |
26 | IMAGINARY – 1 then GINA inside MARY |
27 | RUTLAND – The naval battle is Jutland (1916). Its J for Jack is replaced by R for river to give the English county which has been reinstated since I last looked many years ago. |
28 | ALLISON – Nothing is off so ALL IS ON |
Down | |
1 | VOTARY – OT (holy works) inside VARY (change). I wasn’t familiar with this person bound by vows to a religious life but I expect it’s my memory that’s at fault. |
2 | SCOUNDREL – (LURES DON C)* |
3 |
TRIPOLI – R |
4 | DISGUISED – U (uranium) inside GI (soldier) inside DISSED (treated with contempt) |
5 |
CREEL – C |
6 | LINEAGE – (EAGLE IN)* |
7 | Deliberately omitted |
8 |
INTONATE – INTO (enthusiastic about) + N |
14 |
AMERICANA – CRIMEA* + AN + A |
15 | EGYPTIANS – (PET SAYING)*. Memphis is the ruined ancient city rather than the American one. |
16 | THATCHER – THAT (so) + CHER (dear, in French) |
18 |
ARMENIA – ME (this writer) inside |
19 | RETRIAL – Josef K is the protagonist in Kafka’s The Trial |
20 | CRAYON – RAY (light) inside CON (study) |
22 | ISLET – 1 + the first letters of Secure Lifebelt Expecting To |
23 | ILIAD – And more in similar vein here: kIlL wIzArDs |
It is perhaps a bit surprising that such creative cluing does not produce more difficult puzzles, but there you go.
And it’s ‘disguised’, clearly, from the literal ‘hidden’.
I reckon 4dn, my COD, is DISCUSSED – as you parsed it Jack, but CS (colour or maybe company sergeant) for GI. Makes better sense of the literal.
Edited at 2012-05-04 01:52 am (UTC)
Right, I will now hunker down in a bunker with my hard hat on before the artillery arrives!
Not too many unknowns for me today, and I suspect most of those I’ve come across before so more ‘unremembered’ rather than ‘unknown’.
COD: TRIUMVIRI (once I’d worked it out, and guessed at the Scottish moor).
I had no idea what AMERICANA was so I waited for all the checkers before putting it in. After a bit of research I’m still not entirely clear on exactly what it is, but I think I like it.
Edited at 2012-05-04 08:28 am (UTC)
Edited at 2012-05-04 09:07 am (UTC)
I don’t know what you lot were on about with DISGUISED, but tell me one thing: does CS really equal ‘soldier’? RE, RA, GI for sure, but CS?
Or not …
But mention of Rutland always makes me sad for the loss of Huntingdonshire, where I used to live. When the dreadful, cretinous Edward Heath swept away 900 years of British history at a stroke, both Rutland and Hunts were swept into neighbouring counties and disposed of. But whereas Hunts is just a suburb of Cambridgeshire now, Rutland never accepted its fate. It simply refused to disappear, and later legislation has triumphantly resurrected it. Unlike poor Hunts.
And then on a lighter note, you have the wonderful Allisons
For a long time the NW was pretty blank – couldn’t think what “Roman sex” could possibly mean – but the dominoes fell once Visited popped into my head from ??SITED. LOI the hidden Rondo.
Off to North Wales now for a Bank Holiday weekend’s camping… Enjoy the long weekend everybody.
I originally had ‘hale and hearty’, without knowing why. I later guessed at ‘stitcher’ for 16d (without thinking about how ‘stit’ could mean ‘so’), which made me change 17a to ‘tall and hearty’. I figured this was some kind of beer British sailors drink. 🙂
In a similarly dull-witted fashion, early on I put entered ‘d(ray)en’ instead of ‘crayon’, assuming he must be a children’s author I didn’t know!
I didn’t know either Rutland or Jutland so the blog again came to my aid.
Didn’t know Josef K, the goddess Ate, and never saw ‘sex’ used for ‘six’, but that didn’t seem to matter.
Don’t quite understand how ‘supply’ indicates an anagram.
The surface readings of 1a and 6d are why I love doing the Times puzzles. The most satisfying clue to work out for me was ‘triumviri’.
I also contemplated DRAYEN for a while.
Nice to hear from a new contributor. Do keep it up!
I was unhappy with ‘by slips’ as an anagram indicator in 2dn and also with so = that in 16dn — it seems to be accepted amongst solvers of hard crosswords that a whole lot of little words, mostly prepositions, are interchangeable. In my opinion they must be very equivalent to be interchangeable, and so = that is not good enough. Or is it? Someone will now produce a sentence in which either works.
And at 2dn it’s actually C = caught by (fielder) with ‘slips’ as the anagram indicator.
Edited at 2012-05-04 11:23 pm (UTC)
Thanks to jackkt for seeing that ‘caught’ and ‘caught by’ both equal ‘C’. Knowing the single-letter indicators well is a boon.