Saturday Times 24753 (22nd Jan)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
No exact time for this one as I was interrupted after 5 minutes and didn’t pick it up again until the Tuesday morning commute. Most of it came out fairly quickly but I got bogged down a couple of times, so I’m guessing maybe 15-16 minutes altogether.

Across
1 VICTORIA – VICTOR + I + A. An open carriage named after the Queen.
9 LEAP YEAR – (compan)Y inside [LEAP + EAR].
10 INMOST – IN MOST being the same as “not out much”.
11 RUMINATION – M(illions) inside RUINATION.
12 VERA – VERA(city).
13 GENERALIST – GENERA LIST.
16 OTTOMAN – MOTTO rev + AN. Does anyone still have one of these? In the 70s everyone used to have them, more for storage than for sitting on. Ours was chiefly a blanket box.
17 ANATOLE – A + NATO + LE. Anatole France (1844-1924), French poet and novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember him from an old Guinness Book of Records when I was a child, as having the lightest brain ever recorded. I can’t remember who had the heaviest though.
20 STARVELING – (V real)* inside STING. Robin STARVELING is one of Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals”, who plays Moonshine in their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We had Peter Quince the carpenter last week too in one of the puzzles. The others (for future reference) are Snug the joiner, Nick Bottom the weaver, Francis Flute the bellows-mender and Tom Snout the tinker.
22 LAMB – Charles and Mary Lamb, brother and sister famous for their Tales from Shakespeare for children, published in 1807. Charles was also the crossword-friendly essayist Elia.
23 AFICIONADO – A + FIONA (Scottish girl) around [I + (fabri)C] + DO (make).
25 USED TO – (ousted)*
26 LEANNESS – ANNE inside LESS.
27 OLD GLORY – OLD + L in GORY. A nickname of the Stars and Stripes.

Down
2 INNOCENT – (N not nice)*
3 TROUBADOUR – “true” + BAD + OUR.
4 RETROGRADE – (road, regret)*
5 ALUMINA – A LUMINA(ry).
6 VAIN – “vein”.
7 MEDICI – MEDIC + I
8 BRUNETTE – BRUTE around NET. See 21dn.
14 RUN AGROUND – G inside RUNAROUND (small car). I’ve only ever used “runabout” in this sense, but Chambers gives it as an alternative.
15 LITTLE NELL – LITTLE (modest) + NELL (“knell”). Oscar Wilde said “one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”. Little Nell is the tragic heroine of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop.
16 OBSTACLE – (constable)*
18 LAMENTER – MEN inside LATER. Greeting = crying.
19 PICASSO – PI + CASS(i)O. More Shakespeare – this time it’s Michael Cassio, one of Othello’s lieutenants, who ends up as the Governor of Cyprus.
21 ANIMAL – hidden in “Man I maltreat”.
24 OYEZ – YE in OZ. Traditional call of a town crier.

18 comments on “Saturday Times 24753 (22nd Jan)”

  1. This was far and away the easiest Saturday puzzle I can remember; 31 min., maybe half my usual. Some of the clues triggered answers almost immediately: ‘Wilde’s laughable death’, for instance; or ‘governor of Cyprus’, although it took me a moment to remember that Cassio finally got the job. ‘Moonshine’ somehow triggered ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’, too, but I couldn’t remember the name until I had a couple of crossing letters. Nice to finish so (for me) quickly, but I’d rather have had to take more time to solve some more challenging clues.
  2. 10:02 for a pleasantly literary puzzle. No problems, though (unlike Kevin) I didn’t think of “Wilde’s laughable death” until I had a couple of crossing letters. STARVELING went straight in though.
  3. You’ve both picked up on the only answer I accidentally left out! I’ve just added it. I knew who Little Nell was, but hadn’t come across the Wilde quote before.
  4. Undone by LITTLE NELL (I wrote ‘peal’) – TOCS being one of the Dickens I haven’t read. Even though I read Othello a few months ago, Cassio made no impression, but got it from the checkers.
  5. Dickens? Shakespeare (twice)? Can we have some Chekhov, please. I’ve recently seen a production of Uncle Vanya and am reading The Cherry Orchard. The Seagull comes up in a Sydney theatre later in the year. Must have been easy. I can’t remember my time but it’s no point in me checking the “stats” in The Times CC as Number 100 took all of 33 minutes!
  6. I did put starveling, but I didn’t understand it til now, thanks.. no problem with Little Nell though. My literary knowledge is pretty random. I think “eclectic” is the polite term?
    Not much science here!
  7. Very easy and far too much literature. Science, maths, what are they? There’s a whole different world out there setter for you to explore – try it sometime.
  8. Jerry and Jimbo have a point, although I’m not bothered by the absence of a given area of knowledge in a given puzzle (e.g., no history or philosophy in this one, I believe). The problem is that there is a general prejudice in favor of the humanities in defining what counts as ‘general knowledge’. The educated person is supposed to know French (other languages don’t get you any points), to be able to drop Latin tags, to know what the Pierian spring was, and so on; while who Baron Rumford or Lord Kelvin were, or the difference between an axon and a synapse, is the sort of thing only nerds know. It shouldn’t be too surprising, although it is a pity, that these puzzles reflect this sort of bias.
    1. I am constantly amazed that people who would rather die than admit to not being able to spell or to write are perfectly happy to say they are no good at maths. I see the two as equally basic but as you say, most people don’t..
  9. Well, that’s as may be, but I don’t really see the connection to the point I was trying to make, which is that there is a tendency among most of us–no doubt, setters included–to equate ‘general knowledge’ with ‘humane knowledge’. (It could be worse, of course; ‘The Weakest Link’ or the NYTimes xword take GK to include knowledge of who the hell Lindsey Lohan is.) One is expected to know Wildean quips, but not who said ‘I don’t make hypotheses’ or ‘Still, it moves’. One is expected to recognize names like Zoffany or Tasso but not names like Tesla or Dirac. And so on. Mind you, as a non-scientist and a mathematical ignoramus, I can live with the situation, but still.
    1. I actually know who Lindsey Lohan is – she’s a gift to crossword setters as she’s apparently abbreviated to LiLo :-). On the other hand, I’m afraid I hadn’t heard of Miriam Makeba who appeared in a T2 Concise this week – though I now find that she’s best known for the song Pata Pata, which was the tune I used to dance the Cha Cha Cha to when doing my Latin medal tests.

      The Times crossword has gradually introduced more science over the years I’ve been doing it: TESLA and DIRAC have both appeared more than once in the daily cryptic in the last five years, and your first scientific quote (as you’re presumably aware) has made a very recent appearance.

      As far as I’m concerned, the sciences and the humanities are both fair game, so bring ’em on (with quotations as well, if you like ;-).

  10. I tend to agree with VINYL1 in that I believe the GK of Times’ crossword afficionados is weighted towards the humanities rather than science and that a puzzle based on words will lean towards literary themes rather than scientific ones. I’m rather pleased as I had to choose between arts and sciences after my 3rd year in Grammar school back in 1961 so, while I am familiar with the term, tesla, I haven’t a clue as to it’s meaning. My earlier comment about Chekhov was tongue in cheek of course. As for Lindsay Lohan, I’m afraid, Kevin, we cannot escape such dross, can we. It’s there, in our collective faces at every supermarket check-out.
  11. One thought on quotes: My favourite quote does not fit into a crossword grid as it’s too long but the name of the person who said it, Mandy Rice-Davies, does. Well, she would, wouldn’t she.
  12. Actually, I hadn’t begun the crossword in question when I cited the two scientific quotations; I wouldn’t have cited that one if I had. Evidently the cruciverbalist gods decided to play a little joke on me.(I also realized, too late, that there was a history-related clue: Medici.)

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