I was feeling tired and made extraordinarily heavy weather of this puzzle, missing the obvious UNCERTAIN (I read That Uncertain Feeling years ago), which would almost certainly have given me BOURGEOIS, OCCAM, HEAT and BOOKS. If THE LESSON had been enumerated correctly as (3,6) rather than (9), I’m pretty sure I’d have got that, which would have been enough to give me FORTUNATUS and PENDENNIS. I should really have guessed SPIDER and OCCASIONS, which would have given me INCOG, and I half-guessed TREES but didn’t dare put it in. VIRGIL was a ludicrous miss, but I’d have struggled anyway with COUP, CLARKE and RUSSE. A disappointment after last week’s triumph.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | BOOKS – Disraeli:
(Discuss.) |
| 4 | HAWKSMOOR – hawk’s + moor; the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) was a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren (the TLS puzzle doesn’t adhere to the conventional rules about capital letters) |
| 9 | UNCERTAIN – Kingsley Amis wrote That Uncertain Feeling (1955) |
| 10 | INCOG – a citation from the OED |
| 11 | GAMINE – Enigma* |
| 12 | PETERSEN – pe(terse)n; probably Nis Petersen (1897-1943) |
| 14 | ON THE ROCKS – three meanings including George Bernard Shaw’s play of that name (1933) |
| 16 | COUP – a Scottish word meaning to “to deal”; John Updike wrote The Coup (1978) |
| 19 | SITS – Robert Frost wrote the poem The Secret Sits (first published in A Witness Tree (1942)), which I reproduce here complete:
It was the theme of a Listener crossword some time ago, but I can’t off-hand remember which. |
| 20 | STONEMASON – Cormac McCarthy wrote the play The Stonemason (1995) |
| 22 | GRATIANO – (Tango air)*; one of Antonio’s chums in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice |
| 23 | CLARKE – Marcus Clarke’s novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874) was original published in the Australian Journal between 1870 and 1872 as His Natural Life |
| 26 | WRONG – Angus Wilson wrote the short story collection The Wrong Set (1949) |
| 27 | THE LESSON – Eugène Ionesco wrote La Leçon (The Lesson) (1951) (how annoying – I’d have got that, FORTUNATUS and PENDENNIS but for the wrong enumeration) |
| 28 | ROYALISTS – nominal adherents of Stephen King (born 1947), Francis King (born 1923) and Ellery Queen (1905-1971/82) |
| 29 | TREES – The Trees (1940) is the first novel in Conrad Richter’s trilogy The Awakening Land (I guessed TREES, but wasn’t confident enough to put it in) |
| Down | |
| 1 | BOURGEOIS – Karl Shapiro wrote The Bourgeois Poet (1964) |
| 2 | OCCAM – occam is a programming language named after the philosopher William of Ockham (c1288-c1348) (I don’t recall coming across occam, but I should have guessed it) |
| 3 | STRANGER – Sidney Sheldon wrote A Stranger in the Mirror (1976) |
| 4 | HEAT – Elizabeth Bowen wrote the novel The Heat of the Day (1948), which Harold Pinter adapted for television in 1989 |
| 5 | WUNDERKIND – Thomas Mann wrote Das Wunderkind (1903) |
| 6 | SPIDER – Penelope Lively wrote Spiderweb (1998) |
| 7 | OCCASIONS – Occasions and Protests (1964) is a collection of essays by John Dos Passos |
| 8 | REGAN – Anger*; she and Goneril are the two cruel daughters of King Lear in Shakespeare’s play |
| 13 | FORTUNATUS – Thomas Dekker wrote The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus (1599) ( I’d have got that if I’d had the T from THE LESSON as well as the other crossing letters) |
| 15 | TETRALOGY – as in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1965-75) |
| 17 | PENDENNIS – Major Pendennis is the uncle of Arthur Pendennis, the hero of Thackeray’s novel Pendennis (1848-50) (the N from THE LESSON would have been just enough to jog my memory!) |
| 18 | SMOLLETT – the novelist is Tobias Smollett (1721-71); Captain Smollett is the commander of The Hispaniola in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) |
| 21 | VIRGIL – Tennyson’s poem To Virgil contains the lines:
the name Mantovano referring to Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace (doh! how on earth did I miss that one?) |
| 22 | GOWER – the peninsula is The Gower Peninsula and the poet is John Gower (c1330-1408) |
| 24 | RUSSE – Russ (the original surname of the novelist Patrick O’Brian (1914-2000)) + E; Diaghilev’s company was known as the Ballets Russes (plural) but it was revived by Colonel de Basil as the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (singular) |
| 25 | ZEUS – SUEZ inverted |
>A couple of small typos to correct: VIRGIL is 21D, GOWER 22D.
Corrected at long last (better late …, I suppose).