Solving time: 18:58. No mistakes, but I dithered at the end over 30ac, 55ac and 21dn, none of which I was totally confident about.
I think this was the most straightforward Jumbo for a while, there were no really difficult clues and unlike the previous few I had no significant slow-down on the last few clues. For comparison, my recent Jumbo times have been 23:40 (#666; KALAMAZOO wrong), 19:43 (#667), 29:00 (#668; WORMWOOD missing – thanks to linxit for the explanation!), 24:58 (#669).
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 6 | “ICON TACKED” – nice homophone, I thought of ‘idol’ and ‘icon’ but still didn’t twig. |
| 17 | NEW-FANGLED (anag.) – there seems to be a surfeit of link words in this clue (In England few evolved as excessively modern (10)) – for the cryptic reading to work, I think either ‘in’ or ‘as’ needs to go. |
| 22 | SHIPMEN + T – why does cargo go by ship but a shipment go by car/plane? |
| 24 | RE + “LICKED” – an old word for ‘widow’, from the Latin relictus meaning ‘left behind’. |
| 25 | FREE + BOO + T[i]ER |
| 30 | STUNS + AIL – a stunsail, or stuns’l, or studdingsail, is ‘a narrow additional sail set at the outer edges of a square sail when wind is light and abaft the beam’. I didn’t know this word, but STUNS was the only word meaning ‘overcomes’ I could think of to fit _T_N_. |
| 40 | AERONAUTIC (anag. of NOTICE AURA) – the Montgolfier brothers invented the hot air balloon in the 18th century. |
| 34 | MO’S N/A inside BACH all reversed – one of these. |
| 39 | LIEGE – curiously this word can mean a superior or a subject. I knew the Belgian town from the football club Standard Liège. |
| 46 | JULIAN + C + (AND REAL)* – Julian the Apostate turns out to be the last pagan Roman emperor. |
| 55 | ORGAN(Z)A – this rang only a vague bell but looked a lot better than ‘organxa’ or ‘organya’, though ‘organna’ was a plausible alternative. |
| 56 | NEGLIGE(NC)E – I didn’t know the word ‘peignoir’ but should have got this much faster from the definition (‘dereliction of duty’). |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | DE (= ‘of’ the French) + FOE – refers to Daniel, writer of Robinson Crusoe, but if you prefer Jermain, here’s his brilliant goal against Wigan a couple of weeks ago. |
| 4 | INDUS[try] – an almost identical clue came up in (I think) The Times recently. |
| 5 | GRAN “YOU” LOSE |
| 9 | TRAINS POTTER – a ‘gricer’ (not a word I knew) specifically means a railway enthusiast, not just a general anorak. Any etymology suggestions? |
| 11 | ARISTOCRAT (anag. of IT’S A CARROT) – Debrett is apparently a list of peers and their ancestries. I didn’t get this anagram until I had the final T from 29ac. |
| 21 | anag. of BRED inside STRING – I don’t think I knew this name; August Strindberg was a Swedish writer and playright. |
| 33 | VERN[e] inside GO MENTAL |
| 37 | A + S + PERUS(U)AL |
| 38 | T + (KEF (= marijuana) inside ARIGHT) – a more difficult drug to go with the simpler CHARLIE at 10dn. |
| 51 | PEN + CE – not pen but PEN, the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists. |
| 52 | [s]LOVE[n] – ’47’s heart’ means the centre of clue 47 (= SLOVEN), but I was expecting another level to this and looked for a word meaning ‘love’ to fit _O_E and wasted several seconds trying to make NONE work. |
Jon88
Harry Shipley