Solving time : around 25 minutes, with probably ten minutes staring at 6d before making a guess.
If you like your crosswords a little bit bonkers, you probably enjoyed this. If this puzzle were human, it would be locked away in a padded cell at Broadmoor, babbling about milk pudding while scribbling alternative proofs of Fermat’s last theorem on the floor with a purple crayon. The clues flip from the mundane to the arcane and back again at the drop of a hat (think Dustin “I’m an excellent driver” Hoffman in Rain Man), misfiring regularly along the way (though some of the misfires are interesting in themselves).
I don’t have all the official dictionaries. I’d be grateful if someone who does could check 4d and 22d. I’m following the recent Sunday trend of blogging all clues since this puzzle is the entry point for a lot of new solvers. For the uninitiated ( )* means ‘anagram of’, eg. (act)* = CAT .
Across
| 4 | MARCH HARE – [this clue misnumbered as 1 in the online puzzle] Cryptic(ish). First thought – what’s this doing in a cryptic crossword, given that the march hare is synonymous with madness in the popular simile? On further reflection, perhaps the setter is suggesting that ‘march’ and ‘hare’ are a synonymous pair (two verbs of accelerated movement). They aren’t far apart in a thesaurus, but to call them synonyms is a stretch. Am I missing something? |
| 8 | EX,P(I)ATE – ‘pate’=head |
| 9 | I(MP)ROVE – 1=I |
| 10 | TORONTO – hidden word |
| 11 | PART,I,ALLY – that 1=I again. |
| 13 | MODIFIER – (idiom ref)* Qualifier/modifier in the grammatical senses. |
| 14 | SWAYED – double definition |
| 17 | COCHLEA – (Col[onel],ache)* – ‘located in the ear’ as a cue for ‘cochlea’ won’t be to everyone’s liking. If you’re a parent of young children, you’ll know that every small object in existence can be located in the ear. |
| 19 | TR,EMOR – (first letters of ‘trading registered’)+(‘Rome’ reversed) |
| 23 | LITERARY (it rarely)* – ‘The scholarly type’ as a def. for ‘literary’ is so suspect they’d skip the trial and just throw away the key (Reading Gaol, presumably). |
| 25 | ENLIGHTEN – (I lengthen)* |
| 26 | DIVINER – double def. Rather a nice clue. |
| 27 | REST,ORE |
| 28 | EEL,POUT – ‘eelpout’ is used variously for several species and for the family which includes the viviparous blenny – Zoarces viviparus. Notable for giving birth to live larvae, it’s a “common soup ingredient in Mediterranean countries”. Yum. link |
| 29 | F(URN)ISHED – ‘Cast’ is one of those setters’ delights – a verb with no morphological shift as it slips into the past, and exploited to fine effect here. A stylish clue. |
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Down |
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| 1 | SENTIMENT (it sent men)* – Ho hum. |
| 2 | U,P,GRADE(raged)* – I was thrown for a while by the ‘president’, since UP for ‘at university’ is so common in the Times. The ‘at’ in the clue seems unnecessary. |
| 3 | MAGNIFICO (OC,IF,IN,GA,M) all reversed. For those new to this stuff, OC is Officer Commanding, GA is the abbr. for the state of Georgia, M is the first letter of ‘may’, indicated here by ‘start’. ‘Heading north’ cues the reversal. A MAGNIFICO is one of high rank, esp. in old Venice. Beauty a thing of not this surface is. But three cheers for 5 elements of wordplay in a single-word solution of just nine letters. |
| 4 | METOPE – hidden word. A topee is the good old pith helmet. Metope, as everyone knows, is usually ‘a small space between triglyphs in a Doric frieze’ but it shares its roots with the ancient Greek for ‘forehead’ and is generally found in Eng. only in the adj. ‘metopic’ – ‘of the forehead’. I think ‘metope’ may be used in biological science but I can’t find a dictionary reference. |
| 5 | COMATOSE (came, soot)* – one of those allusive definitions, and a surface that doesn’t convince. |
| 6 | HARM,ALA – the online version reads ‘Damaged’ but should surely be ‘Damage’=’harm’ (can someone confirm the print version was the same?). Probably not the setter’s fault. ALA (Latin for ‘wing’) is “either of the two side petals of a flower in the legume family, such as the pea.” Some remarkable photographs here. The harmala family includes the Syrian bean-caper. Extracted harmala alkaloids include the mind-altering Telepathine, used by Amazonian natives to commune with spirits and to promote telepathy. But you probably knew I was going to say that. |
| 7 | R,EVOLVE |
| 12 | ARMHOLE (molar,he)* – There’s a good joke in there struggling to get out. |
| 15 | WATER VOLE (rat we love)* |
| 16 | DEHYDRATE (they dread)* Anagram #9 of 12 and third in a row in the down clues. I’m an excellent driver. |
| 18 | ORC(HARD)S – checking letters and the (vague) def. ‘where fruit is to be found’ rendered the obscure wordplay somewhat redundant. An ORC is ‘any of several cetaceans, such as a grampus’, and a HARD (n) is ‘a firm or solid beach or foreshore’. |
| 20 | RONDEAU – (R=rex/regina) + (an ode)* + (U=acceptable, as in “non-U”) |
| 21 | MOISTEN (Notes I’m)* – opp. of 18d DEHYDRATE. Nice doubling. |
| 22 | MA(INTO)P – the maintopsail is the sail above the mainsail. Most dictionaries give ‘maintop’ as a mast-top platform and only have ‘maintopsail’ (one word) for the sail. The ‘following’ seems to mean the result of making ‘into’ the interior of ‘map’, with some odd syntax. |
| 24 | INDEED (denied)* Oldie, but goodie. |
Bean Stew anyone?