Sunday Times 5176 by Robert Price – Crocodile Rock

51 comments on “Sunday Times 5176 by Robert Price – Crocodile Rock”

1. This was beautifully crafted and amusing for us/me. Had seen the top and bottom ‘messages’ but not twigged to the obvious ‘Sons and Lovers’ for top.
   Cannot see any more connection between the D H Lawrence novel and the Terence Rattigan play – other than exploration of uncommon relationships.
   Admired 24ac ABACUS, 2d NICKER, 17d SUITCASE and 19d VARIES for conciseness, clarity and amusement – including penny drop moments.
   Also liked 27ac for personal reasons: Cambridge (brand) made squash racquets back in the day, and the ‘blue’ was particularly well balanced and a joy to use.
   Plaudits to setter and keriothe. (Crocodile Rock indeed)

2. Thanks for the blog. Totally agree about “cycling”.

   1. ✊

      1. However this usage conforms to the mathematical use in the sense of a cyclic permutation. That’s been in use for decades.

         1. I don’t think the xwd version has anything to do with “cyclic permutations”, although it may be a subset of them. (More in other comment.)

3. DNF
   This took me almost 50′, and I didn’t get NHO NICKER (put in NICKEL, for no good reason). I also didn’t understand 3d, never having heard of Lara. I liked 15d

   1. Not enough British TV – ‘nicker’ slang for English pound (also underwear).
      Brian Lara is a fairly modern and accomplished Jamaican batsman (cricket).

      1. ‘Fairly modern’ – basically retired 20 years ago!
         And Trinidadian 😛

         1. It’s a fair cop!

            Modern compared to me, and many of the all-time cricket greats from various countries with which I am more familiar.

            1. Thinking about it the most familiar cricketer to Kevin is probably WG Grace.

               1. 😁

               2. As I once posted here, Grace was –until today–the only cricketer I knew of.

            2. Lara retired in 2006, at which point he was the second highest run scorer in test cricket of all time (having briefly been top of the tree, but subsequently passed by Tendulkar, who remains number 1). Since then, Lara has dropped to 8 on the all time list, having been surpassed by the all time leading run scorers from India (as already mentioned and by another Indian, Dravid), England (twice, two Englishmen), Australia, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

               So surely there are many all time greats that followed Lara?

               1. Indeed: hence it is a bit much to expect American solvers to have heard of them. On the other hand this is a British crossword so it just comes with the territory.

   2. Yeah both of those are tough for a Murcan. You have learned more cricket terminology than you could possibly want from doing these things but individual players is another level. Lara is one of the all-time greats but still!

      1. But surely he liked last Saturday’s – with enough US to choke a hippo.

4. Is it me or are Robert’s puzzles getting a bit tougher recently? Anyway, I enjoyed this although 2d held me up for a while…NICKER- somewhat obsolete, probably last heard in an episode of the Sweeney circa 1975.

5. After 32 minutes with all but two intersecting answers in place I used reveal to check my tentative answer STRIKE at 1dn and found it was wrong. The S-checker provided then helped me with SPELL at 12ac, the other answer that had eluded me to that point. If STRIKE had been right I was considering KNELL as a mildly cryptic possibility, but as we know, two word clues are nearly always double definitions. Despite falling foul on these last two (on reflection entirely my own fault) I’d have said this was easier than most of Robert’s offerings.

   I’m interested in the apparent animosity to the ‘cycling’ device. More detail on the objection might help me understand what’s thought to be wrong with it.

6. Cycling: it’s not a personal favourite, but as it has become much more common over the last few years, I can’t really tell setters that it won’t be understood. The version I’m currently prepared to allow is very specific – much more so than the “cyclic permutations” that one commenter mentioned. If you write the letters of a word in a circle, this form of “cycling” produces a sequence of letters in the same order (and direction), but starting at a different point. So ABCD can only become one of BCDA, CDAB, or DABC.

   The process is familiar to me from past work, programming in APL. That has a specific operation doing the same thing, though its usual name in English is “rotate”, because it’s a process without a standard name in everyday English.

   1. Thanks, Peter, I don’t have any doubts myself about how it works and have posted images here to illustrate the circular device on a number of occasions (there’s one in our Glossary under ‘cycling’). What I don’t understand is the comment in the blog about ‘cycling’ taking on a meaning that’s ‘in defiance of any normal use of the word in standard English’.

      1. I think the point is that it needs the letters to be in a circle to suddenly sound sensible. What’s definitely lacking in everyday English is a word for the overall process.

         1. Well quite. If the letters were in a circle I’d have no objection to the device but they’re not! It’s just completely nonsensical to me.

            1. The circle is just a convenient way of illustrating the principle for beginners. The device is simply a variation on the full anagram (in which any letter can move to any position) whereas cycling follows a specific, predictable pattern – the first letter moves to the end, and so on as in Peter’s ABCD examples and JerryW’s explanation in the Glossary. No circles need to be involved.

               1. I understand how the device is supposed to work but this just isn’t what ‘cycling’ means in normal English. We could all agree that by crossword convention ‘avocado’ means that you remove the fourth and seventh letters of a word and I’m sure we’d all get used to it quite quickly.

                  1. I won’t bore you with reasons why that “avocado” meaning would not get past me, and I hope, any others. But if cryptic crossword trickery has to match “normal English”, you logically have to say the same about “flower” for a river and “the French” meaning “French for ‘the'”, which are logically just as bad, but we all got used to them before we understood enough to say so.

                     1. I don’t agree. A river is a thing that flows. ‘The French’ is awkward (and not my favourite formulation) but you can justify it on the basis of the other convention that we ignore punctuation. ‘The, French’ or ‘The (French)’ are valid ways of writing ‘French for the’.
                        In the ‘cycling’ device there is, to my mind, absolutely no logical connection between the meaning of the word in everyday English and the nature of the manipulation that is supposed to result.

                        1. On those two points, I agree, but “only varies from everyday English in a way that makes enough sense” isn’t the standard you mentioned. And as soon as we say something like “enough sense”, we’re in “judgement rather than precision” territory.

                           1. Of course this is a matter of judgement and opinion, but for me these two examples do not vary meaningfully from everyday English. ‘Flower’ is a literal plain English description of a river! ‘Cycling’ doesn’t just vary a bit from everyday English, it departs from it entirely to the point that it’s more like my ‘avocado’ example than ‘flower’. But I recognise that I’m not going to win this one!

                  2. Somehow I’ve never had a problem with this. I may have first encountered it from Joshua and Henri and thought it was their innovation. One definition of “cycle” in Collins is “to process through a cycle or system,” and processing through a cycle seems plausibly what you do in mentally rotating the letters. Intransitively, “to move in or pass through cycles” doesn’t seem far off the mark either.

                     I also can’t imagine what else “cycling” could possibly mean, as an instruction in a clue.

                     1. The oldest example I can find for “cycling” itself is in 1982 in the Azed clue writing contest – http://www.andlit.org.uk/azed/cluelist.php?series=A&comp_no=538 (R J Hooper). But the next one found by searching on the same site is in 2018.

                        1. Interesting, that’s much older than I would have expected. My impression is that it’s a much more recent innovation in the Times.

                           1. I agree – it looks like an isolated idea, from someone who (barring name coincidences) also sent some clues to the ST contest much later, but I think is no longer with us. The oldest mention I can find on TfTT is from 2022 – https://timesforthetimes.co.uk/times-28247-%E2%9C%82%E2%9C%AA%E2%9D%A5%E2%9D%BF%E2%9E%B9%E2%9E%B0%E2%9D%A1
                              It looks as if it was used elsewhere about 3 years earlier:
                              https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/crossword-blog/2019/may/27/cryptic-crosswords-for-beginners-cycling-clues

                              1. Yes that tallies with my experience. I have a vague memory of having encountered it in the Graun before it started appearing in the Times.

                                 1. I have continued this thread below as we’re running out of space here.

7. I parsed 6d as Keriothe did, after a bit of thought – but was unable to parse 3d, which I now see is excellent. In the days when I followed cricket Brian Lara was very well known, of course, but that was twenty years ago, as K says. LOI the straightforward SUITCASE, for which I have no excuse. Nor can I explain why, after considering an anagram of A GREEN I should have then abandoned the idea until it was my POI! It seems my problems were all with the easy clues – perhaps just over-thinking? I missed the two references to literature, but then I always do – the effort of actually doing the crossword militates against subsequently analysing it!

8. My thanks to Robert Price and keriothe.
   DNF, ran out of energy on the pretty simple 10a Ribeye and 23a Stake.
   2d Nicker. Interestingly nicker is both singular and plural, as in “give me 50 nicker” not nickers.
   POI 15d Telescope. Of the many things that can be called meteors none is best viewed through a telescope, but I suppose that isn’t important.

9. DNF, with STRIKE and KNELL rather than STRESS and SPELL

   – It feels like George SAND has come up several times recently, which is useful for getting him lodged in my head
   – Relied on wordplay to get the unknown ATROPINE
   – Had no idea how SMELL A RAT worked, as I didn’t know smelt as a fish and never thought of Brian Lara

   Thanks keriothe and Robert.

   COD Alligator

   1. Her!

      1. Oops – should have remembered/realised it was a pen name.

         Thanks!

   2. FYI George Sand was a woman

10. This is further to the discussion on cycling clues above. The thread is getting a bit squashed in at the sides there and I need more space for this one:

    The earliest example at TfTT was in the March 2015 Club Monthly blogged on 27 March 2015. Here’s what JerryW as duty blogger wrote that day:

    26. Still cycling is common locally (3)

    tye – YET “cycling” ie with the letters moved one place to the right, last to first. A comment on the forum said that it was perhaps “Not quite Ximenean,” but didn’t explain why it ought to be, or how it fell short. I admire Ximenes very much and I like to think he would not want to see the principles that he elucidated used to stifle creativity. He certainly ignored them often enough himself. I see nothing at all wrong with (for example) an indirect anagram, (which strictly this isn’t) provided the clue is also fair and solvable. “Rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the observance of fools.” Tyes are dotted around the country – Holtye in E Sussex for example, neatly combines two ancient words, holt meaning wood and tye meaning common or enclosed land.

    Comments on the subject posted by others were:
    1 (by Anon) Yes, 26dn is certainly not intended to be an anagram. Tho I heartily agree with the comments re Ximenes

    2 (by dorsetjimbo) Today, 29th March, is Ximenes’ birthday (born 1902)
    His own clues were highly creative whilst adhering to his own principles. I don’t remember him breaking his own rules and certainly not when adjudicating clue submissions to his competitions where the Ximenes Slip was a veritable mine of information, particularly for learners such as I was at the time. If you can produce an example of X using an indirect anagram I may have a nervous breakdown.

    3 (by Jerry respoding to Jim)
    That sounds like a challenge but it is unfortunately not one I have time to take up. However my belief is that McNutt was only trying to bring a little more order to what was in his day a rather chaotic scene; and that he never envisaged or supported the emergence of “Ximenean”
    fanatics who will brook no departure at all from what he called principles, but never rules.

    4 (by Jimbo again)
    I’m basing my opinions on written communication with X during 1960s and being on the fringes of a conversation between him and solvers at Cafe De Paris towards end of 1960s
    I agree he was not a fanatic and would not have approved of fanaticism. However, he had a firm view of what he judged acceptable and I can assure you that indirect anagrams were a no-no. [Pedants Corner – his name was Macnutt methinks].

    1. Thanks jackkt, interesting and nice to be reminded of our old friend Jimbo.
       My view of this device is not based on Ximenean principles or anything of the kind, just on what I regard as the plain meaning of English words. This is always a matter of debate of course and I completely accept that others – including clearly the people who matter, i.e. setters like Robert and editors like Peter – will disagree with me. My main objective in being a little provocative in my comment was to trigger a debate – mission accomplished 😉

    2. Needing to crack on with everyday work …

       I agree with the idea that X might be quite surprised by his role as the absolute ultimate authority. There’s a very modest statement in his famous book which practically says so, and I quoted it in the ST 100 years book – top of p. 9

    3. Thank you for posting that Jackkt.. I am not sure nowadays that I would be so bold as to assert that Ximenes “ignored his own rules often enough.” Not even sure where I got that idea, in fact!

11. Is the objection to ‘cycling’ (which has always seemed fine to me) from some quarters the same as the objection to Spooner clues? The words signal what you have to do. But then if it is why don’t people object to the ‘some’ device for a hidden? They’re all such giveaways.

    1. No my objection is precisely that the words don’t signal what you have to do. Unless you are already aware of the convention you can’t logically deduce the required treatment of the source word from the word ‘cycling’. So this is a pure convention akin to my avocado example above.

       1. When I said ‘from some quarters’ this wasn’t a reference to your criticism of ‘cycling’ clues. I see what you are saying, but my awareness of the word — apart from its obvious meaning in connection with bicycles — comes from maths, where to cycle a string of numbers is to do exactly what the setter intends.

          1. Ah I see, sorry. I’m aware of this mathematical meaning because others have mentioned it but to my mind it’s too specialised for generalised use. Others disagree!

             1. It never occurred to me but perhaps it is a bit specialised.

12. Liked this a lot, not least because the first four across clues went in straight “off the bat” ( if I’m allowed a cricket reference here🥸); but then I proceeded more cautiously , and didn’t ‘get’ the more obvious ones ( like the top half of SUITCASE ) and the forgotten BUTTER UP for flatter. Also had forgotten that we always used to say BLOCK CAPITALS, but now only capitals, I think. But overall the clues revealed themselves slowly , and I made a good time (for me!)

13. Thanks Robert and keriothe
    Finally finished this one whilst working from home down at Inverloch, a lovely seaside town on the southern coast of Victoria, where my partner lives. Was held up for weeks with 2d until the penny finally dropped – must’ve been the sea air !
    A good variety of clue devices used throughout and some that were pretty tricky to see – all the more satisfying when one could actually crack them. Favourites in this department were DIEPPE, ABACUS and that NICKER (which I didn’t know could be used for the plural ‘pounds’). These, unsurprisingly, were my last three in.
    Was looking out for his typical ninas at the top and bottom – but didn’t twig that both of them related to literary works.

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