Saturday Times 25424 (16th March)

Posted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Sorry, PC problems have prevented me posting today. Following a hasty rebuild I should have it up later tonight. Well, that was the plan anyway, but I also managed to break my keyboard (and the PS/2 port), and my almost-completed blog report was only available on this box, in memory as I hadn’t saved it. So I now have a nice new wireless keyboard and mouse, and here it is, better late than never. Quite a lot of GK required for this one – lots of proper nouns, a couple of literary references, Greek words and geography.

Across
1 CONSTANTINOPLE – CONSTANT (firm) + (line)* around OP (work). Name of Istanbul from 330AD to 1453, when it was capital of the Byzantine empire.
9 DEVELOPED – DERV (fuel) without the R (run out) + ELOPED (left secretly).
10 DIPSO – O (duck) next to DIPS (sauces).
11 RELAX – ALE (beer) inside X (by), R(olling), all reversed.
12 LEND AN EAR – N(ew) + DANE (Hamlet perhaps), inside LEAR (King Lear, another tragic figure).
13 IRONWOOD – IRON, WOOD (golf clubs). A generic name for a number of different trees renowned for the hardness of their wood.
15 JORDAN – OR (golden) + (see)D inside JAN (month). The River Jordan, which is 156 miles long and for much of its length is the border between Israel and Jordan.
17 HECATE – HEATE(r) (stove minus the last letter) around C(old).
19 WRITE OFF – double definition.
22 OVEN-READY – (year do)* around VEN (abbreviated title of an archdeacon).
23 GATOR – ROT (corrupt) + AG (chemical symbol of silver), all reversed.
24 IONIA – alternate letters of “disowns Ivan”. Ancient region of what is now Turkey, bordering Lydia.
25 HOI POLLOI – Greek for “the masses”, both words of which rhyme with “enjoy”. By the way, HOI means “the”, so please feel free to correct anyone who refers to “the hoi polloi”!
26 KICK IN THE PANTS – (Kerosene, kept in this can)*.

Down
1 CIDER WITH ROSIE – (writer chose, 1 I’d)*. 1959 book by Laurie Lee.
2 NOVELLO – NOVEL (original) + L(eft) + O(ver). Ivor Novello (1893-1951), Welsh composer, singer and actor.
3 TELEX – TEL(ler) (half of narrator) + EX (other half one’s separated from). Old messaging system – what we had before fax or email was invented.
4 NAPOLEON – NON (French opposition member) around A POLE (a stick). Napoleon was one of the pigs who took over George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
5 INDENT – IN (home) + DEN (study) + T(utor).
6 ODD MAN OUT – the answer could be a cryptic indication for “amount”.
7 LIP-READ – LIP (backchat) + RE (on) + AD (trailer).
8 ROARING FORTIES – RARING (keen) around O(ld), + FOR (pro) + TIES (matches).
14 WATERMARK – ARK (box) below W(ith) + A TERM (a handle).
16 CRAYFISH – IF (condition) + Y (variable), reversed inside CRASH (accident).
18 CHENNAI – HENNA (stain) + I (one), beneath C(ape). The new name for Madras (since 1996).
20 ORTOLAN – hidden inside “Luxor to Lanzarote”. Type of bunting, a French delicacy.
21 CASH IN – CA (calcium) + SHIN (scale).
23 GLOOP – LOO (little room) inside GP (Grand Prix, racing cars).

13 comments on “Saturday Times 25424 (16th March)”

  1. I was in Edinburgh last weekend visiting family and friends and didn’t get round to solving this until yesterday (23rd).
    Worked through it steadily from SE corner outwards. Took a while to deduce Cider With Rosie but once in the starting letters helped on the left-hand side.
    Constantinople took a long time to come – for ages I was looking at an anagram of O + City + Spun + Firm + L. Once I saw the answer my last three (Novello, Napolean and LOI Developed) quickly followed.
    Liked the literary references for Napolean (Animal Farm) and Lend An Ear (Julius Caesar). Thanks setter.
    1. You had me checking my spelling there, but fortunately the last vowel was checked in the puzzle. It’s one of those words the more I think about the less certain I am!

      Edited at 2013-03-24 09:09 am (UTC)

  2. 37 minutes excluding 18dn which I had to look up as I rarely cope with the new names of old cities.

    I’m pleased to see old Ivor is not forgotten. It’s interesting you mention that he was a singer and indeed he wrote many of his musical shows for himself to star in so he must have had a voice, yet there do not appear to be any recordings available of him singing and I don’t recall ever hearing one.

    1. I’m not 100% sure but I think the character in the film “Gosford Park” who is singing at the piano in the drawing room is supposed to be Ivor Novello. He was certainly a well known singer in his day.
      1. That’s right, performed by the actor Jeremy Northam. In fact it was seeing that that prompted me to look for recordings of Ivor himself, but I was unable to find any. If he was selling out theatres in the West End with his shows it’s very odd that he appears not to have released any recordings of whatever he sang on stage. Or he did and they’ve all been buried over the years that followed.
        1. If you go here and click on, say, “The Girl I knew” then I think that is him.. you must remember, he sang as a soprano! itunes has several albums marked “original recordings”
  3. 43′. Luckily for me, ROARING FORTIES had (re-)appeared recently enough to jog my memory; ditto NOVELLO. DNK DERV, and hadn’t the vaguest idea of how 9ac worked, and I was too dim to get the by=X in RELAX. Also DNK 1d, and although I knew enough to somehow think of CHENNAI, given the word I could’t have told you what it referred to. COD to 6d or 21d, can’t decide. And feel free to refrain from correcting me when I say ‘the hoi polloi’, at least when I’m speaking English.
  4. 54 minutes and a struggle. My main holdup was not seeing the old city straight away. I’m another who wasted time looking for anagram fodder. So I started from the bottom and worked up – always a slower method. A nice puzzle though. I got a satisfying buzz from finishing it. I particularly liked the “pig farmer”. I kept thinking of the film “Leon the Pig Farmer” and had LEON as a possibility before remembering “Animal Farm”.
  5. I think this took me about 25 minutes. Not sure – I did it on paper, on a train.
    CIDER WITH ROSIE strikes me as verging on the obscure. I know it, but only because it was on my parents’ bookshelves. I may even have read it. But it’s not exactly an enduring classic.
    1. True, but it’s also known through two very successful screen adaptations for TV in the 70s and late 90s which revived interest in it for later generations.
      1. You might be right: I missed the one in the late 90s (and I was never older than 7 in the 70s!). Still it’s not a book you really hear referred to these days.
    2. It’s definitely one of those books that’s never off the bestseller lists in Crosswordland – according to Fifteensquared, Araucaria (in his various guises) has referred to it 3 times this year alone.

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