Saturday Times 25065 (21st Jan) – Times for The Times

24:03 for this tricky little beast. I didn’t know 18D and had to get it from the wordplay, but the one that totally threw me for a while was 23A – E?G??E?N?O just doesn’t look like it’s going to be a word, and I started looking for errors elsewhere before finally unpicking the wordplay – only to find it was a word I knew all along!

Across
1	TEA PARTY – APART (separate) inside YET (still) reversed. Brilliant clue to start off with – not a syllable wasted, and totally misleading but perfectly fair.
9	OLIGARCH – (goal, rich)*
10	SO LONG – SOLO (performance by one) + N(o) + G(ood).
11	BEHIND BARS – BARS (counters) with BEHIND (something to sit on).
12	AGOG – GO (split) reversed next to AG (silver = shiny metal). Two on the trot with the wordplay reversed, just to make it harder.
13	UKRAINIANS – UK (this country) + RAIN (drops) + (in a s)*.
16	LYING-IN – FLYING IN (arriving at Heathrow, perhaps) minus the first letter.
17	EGOTIST – ET (“Nice and” = “and” in Nice) around GOT(h) (old German briefly) + IS (one’s). Definition “number one fan” = “fan of number one”. Another one with a very misleading surface.
20	DOMAIN NAME – DOME (London landmark) around A, INN, A, M(edium).
22	EELY – STEELY (hard) without ST (blessed fellow).
23	EIGHTEENMO – E’EN (even) + M.O. (modus operandi = method of working), after EIGHT (team rowing). A printer’s paper size created by folding and cutting the printed sheet into 18ths, giving a page size of approx. 4 x 6 inches.
25	OONAGH – OO (loves) + NAG (pester) + H(usband). Glad I’m not married to her – Sue’s bad enough!
26	UP IN ARMS – double definition, one whimsical.
27	HISSY FIT – (I Y(ear)’s shift)*. Definition “wobbly” is a noun, being what you might throw when you have one!

Down
2	ENOLA GAY – ALONE reversed (rising unaccompanied) + GAY (not straight). The name of the bomber that dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima.
3	PROPAGANDA – “proper gander” (Cockney rhyming slang – butcher’s (hook) = look). I bet Jimbo was spluttering into his cornflakes over that one!
4	RUGBY UNION – RUG (wrap) + (bo)Y inside BUNION (painful swelling).
5	YOGHURT – (tough, RY)*, the RY from R(ubber)Y.
6	KILN – L(oaves) inside KIN (family).
7	ARMADA – AR (celebrity minus ST) + MAD (raving) + A (article). Great use of lift-and-separate.
8	CHESS SET – SSE (alternate letters of SyStEm) inside CHEST (treasury). Good, precise definition – “men, along with the board”.
14	INGLENOOKS – IN GLENS (valleys) around O (zero), OK (green light).
15	IN THE MONEY – hidden inside “Needlepoint hem – one you”
16	LADLE OUT – LAD (young male) + LOUT (hooligan) around E(cstasy).
18	SOLFEGGI – FLO’S (Nightingale’s informally) reversed + EG (example) + G(rand) I (one). Plural of solfeggio, singing exercise involving do-re-mi.
19	VARNISH – VAINISH (rather concerned with appearance), with the first I replaced by an R (runs for one).
21	MAGPIE – MAG (Spectator perhaps) + PIE(r) (endless attraction of Brighton).
24	EARL – (p)EARL(s). I always thought an earl was higher than a count, but apparently they’re equivalent.

6 comments on “Saturday Times 25065 (21st Jan)”

Around 50 minutes with one cheat which I still managed to get wrong. I looked up 23ac and got EIGHTEENVO from somewhere. On revisiting the dictionary today I think I must have seen 8vo (octavo) and extrapolated an answer from that. This was an excellent puzzle.

Edited at 2012-01-28 12:17 pm (UTC)

Thank you,thank you for that patently honest 24.03 solution time – now I don’t feel so bad at having to give up with 25% unfinished ! Very ingenious clues and strictly exact for the most part but maybe sailing a bit close to the wind in 17A – “Got” is “Goth briefly” indeed ! Wouldn’t pass muster in Hamburg methinks.

12:03 here for another first-rate puzzle – just one in a run of crackers.

Bad luck with EIGHTEENMO. I’m all too familiar with making that sort of assumption and then finding there was an answer that I knew perfectly well all along.

I don’t remember coming across the plural of SOLFEGGIO before, but at least it was pretty obvious.

Nice one this. I knew SOLFEGGIO but, like Tony, had never heard the plural. “Florence” is my own name, the one I don’t answer to and which I suffered throughout my schooldays, so I got that bit fairly quickly! I had to use aids to get the letter M in EIGHTEENMO. I knew it was a paper size but couldn’t remember the ending. 33 minutes

About 27 minutes, I think.

I wish I could say that I trusted my wordplay skills enough to have gone with EIGHTEENMO unchecked, but no way was I clicking ‘submit’ until I’d run that one past Google. That has to be one of the unlikeliest looking words in the language.

A hard, but satisfying 58′. I thought of ‘arpeggio’ for 18d and couldn’t get it out of my head for the longest time. I also put in EIGHTEENVO at first, but checked before submitting. I hadn’t thought of ‘agog’ as meaning ‘curious’ (SOED gives ‘expectant’), but with 2 G’s… ENOLA GAY shows up all too often in the NY Times puzzles. CODs to 17ac and 15d (one of the best hiddens I’ve seen–THIS 15d does exist, Jerry!).

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