Quick Cryptic no 3219 by Shay

This one caused quite a hold-up as I tried various ways of unravelling the clue, including E for “each leader”, and then trying to find a word for best mate to insert in (or delete from) a word for a car.  In short, I was all over the place until the penny dropped.

I initially thought that flap gave just DO, so I was not entirely sure I understood where the A came from until I remembered Shakespeare’s play “Much ado about nothing”.

Another very concise clue, with lots going on in just 6 words.  And another one where I was way off in my first attempt to unravel it, looking to put a detective (perhaps from one of the Sharp novels?) into C~T.

A very smooth surface.  And however vile the mead was, I suspect it was preferable to drinking the water.

The city of Acre is now known as Akko (in Hebrew) or Akka (in Arabic), and is one of the oldest settlements in the world, having been continually inhabited since the Middle Bronze Age.  It offers a safe port on a coast without very many natural harbours, and as a result has been subject to attack, conquest and destruction several times in its 4,000 year history, not least during the Crusades when it was one of the first cities to fall to the Crusaders (in 1104) and their last stronghold in the Holy Land prior to their final expulsion in 1291 after the Siege of Acre.  Today the city is one of Israel’s most mixed cities (32% of the city’s population are Arabs), and it is also the holiest city of the Baha’i faith.

Another clue where I started off on completely the wrong foot, as I tried to make an anagram out of lackey.  Fortunately  it didn’t take too long to realise that no, I couldn’t.

Cute as cunning is the older and more traditional meaning of the word – originally it was a shortening of acute, a word meaning “clever, shrewd” since Shakespeare’s time, and even into the 20^th century children were still being called cute as a compliment to their intelligence.  The connection with children led finally about 100 years ago to it being used to mean attractive or pretty.  But the meaning “cunning” does still exist:  in such sentences as “Don’t get cute with me,” cute has nothing to do with adorable sweetness.

And a very nice lift-and-separate at the end of the clue, as “natural flair” could itself mean elan – but we need natural to be part of the wordplay.

This one was yet another where I was completely misled at first, as I thought Examine was the definition, and the wordplay two components made up of “men’s accessories” plus “ladies’ underwear”.  When the penny dropped that I was looking at the clue backwards, the answer still did not emerge immediately, as Scanties is perhaps rather an outdated term for women’s skimpy underwear – the word was coined around the late 1920s as a blend of the adjective scant and the noun panties, but I have not seen it much used recently. 

Goodness me, there is a lot for a psychologist to unpack here, with a stepmother being called vacuous, ugly and complacent all in a 7 word clue.  Could Shay have had an unhappy childhood?

A very smooth surface, which I only fully understood when I realised that there was more than one round of operations in the course of surgery.

And right at the end Shay caused me to think very hard, and on a 4 letter clue too, as until I got both checkers I could not make any sense of the wordplay, not least because of the very clever and misleading use of the commas in the clue.