Solving time: about 25 mins
Solved this at the airport or on the plane a fortnight ago and then forgot to keep it, so the time is a guesstimate. Some nicely done long anagrams and partial anags in this one.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 16 | ST MARTIN IN THE FIELDS – (and this minister left)*. The church in Trafalgar Square which is apparently the “architectural blueprint” for many American churches. |
| 21 | DAR(WIN IS)T – dart = move quickly = “race”. |
| 29 | POSIT(ively) |
| 30 | IM,M,ANENT – anent = old word for ‘about’ |
| 34 | GR(A.V.)IT,AS |
| 36 | HIBERNAL – Bern in hail* – new word to me but fits the pattern of vernal and aestival |
| 39 | ENCHANTMENT – from the proverb or saying ‘distance lends enchantment’ |
| 49 | (l)IVY |
| 50 | DECONTEXTUALISATION – (anxieties a lot cut)* in don. |
| Down | |
| 5 | GOSSIP COLUMN – (miss coupling so)* |
| 7 | YOU NEVER CAN TELL – One of Shaw’s “Plays Pleasant”, it turns out. |
| 10 | ROBES,P.(I,ERR)E. |
| 22 | DOMINANT – in music, ‘dominant’ is the name for the pitch a perfect fifth above the tonic. Other similar names in major scale order: tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading note, tonic. Very clever for those who know enough, probably a very annoying clue for those who don’t. I’m supposed to know enough and it was still one of my last answers if not the last. |
| 24 | DENNIS=sinned<=,THE MEN,ACE |
| 27 | NE(R.N.)ST – who turns out to be a physicist (though his Nobl prize was for Chemistry.) |
| 32 | MAUDLIN = “Magdalen” – the Oxford college whose name doesn’t sound like Mary M. |
| 35 | I HAVE A DREAM – (ever, a maid ah)* |
| 43 | T,R(I)UMP,H |
| 46 | MATT.,INS – which is at dawn in the cycle of canonical hours, before prime. |
| 51 | ILEUS – a lack of passge caused by an obstruction in the bowel, so the clue is arguably an &lit. |
Personally I found this a very “obscure” puzzle, and 30A and 39A illustrate this, as well as others. I think 22D should have been banned; I could have set a question on advanced physics with as much justification!
I still do not understand the wordplays in 17A and 45A (although I did the trivial thing of guessing the answers correctly). Any explanation would be appreciated.
Philip C
45A – you’re in good company, as I’ve been asked by e-mail about this one already. One of the old Times xwd tricks you gradually learn is {time = “enemy” or “the enemy”}, which I guess is an old colloquialism. It survives in Chambers under ‘enemy’, in the expression “how goes the enemy?”, meaning “what time is it?”. So this is just a punny cryptic def based on this knowledge.
22D I wouldn’t quite ban – given N?R?S?, service = R.N. seems pretty obvious, so N?S? must be the “comfortable home”, for which “nest” seems fairly straightforward. But that’s from a background of doing Azed and the like, where finding words you don’t know from wordplay is an important skill to have.
However, you have misread the clue number I was grumbling about. This was 22D not 27D. (I didn’t have to think about NERNST!
Philip