Sunday Times 4535 (28 Apr 2013) by Jeff Pearce

Posted on Categories Weekend Cryptic
Solving time: 34 minutes offline

I printed this one off and solved while cooking dinner. In truth, all that really involved was inserting the odd dish into the oven at various intervals, so I don’t suppose it cost me much time. I found it quite easy, but enjoyable. The simplicity of 11a was good so I’ll give that my COD.

cd = cryptic def., dd = double def., rev = reversal, homophones are written in quotes, anagrams as (–)*, and removals like this

Across
1 STEWARD = (SET)* + WARD
5 C(RIMS)ON
9 MEDALLION = (LAID LEMON)* – I quite liked the way the adjective ’round’ masquerades as a preposition in the surface.
10 F(Lakra)AIR
11 TH(RON)E
12 P + RO(L + O)GUE
14 ARCHITRAVE = (ART)* in ARCHIVE
16 TIDY – dd
18 bOARS
19 FANNY ADAMS – cd – ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ or more usually ‘Sweet F.A.’ is an expression in English meaning nothing at all.
22 DIATRIBE = (A + BRIDE + IT)*
23 STOKER – dd – Bram Stoker write Dracula</>
26 ALIBI – cd
27 ALPENHORN = AL + HORN about PEN
28 L(ANY)ARD
29 MET(HAN)E
Down
1 SUM + boATRAce
2 EIDER – cd
3 ATLA(NT + I)S
4 D(R)IP
5 CONT(RAVEN)E
6 IN FULL – I don’t understand this one, so perhaps someone else can explain it for me.
7 S(Honey)ANGRI(Lime)A
8 NURSERY = seasoN + (SURREY)*
13 BREAD + BOARD
15 CARe + NATION
17 MART + I + NET
18 ODD + BALL
20 ST + RANGE
21 peresTROIKA
24 KRONA = NOAH losing A + H (losing a bit of hard) in ARK, all rev
25 Some Porn And Marketing

12 comments on “Sunday Times 4535 (28 Apr 2013) by Jeff Pearce”

  1. No idea of my time, but it definitely was a while. Although I was hoping to find an explanation of IN FULL, it’s at least a comfort of sorts to find the blogger also puzzled. I wasn’t sure that general=MARTINET (surely some of them aren’t?), nor that DIATRIBEs are necessarily, or even frequently, pompous, nor that sissy=DRIP. Also–and I’ve had this feeling elsewhere–in 22ac, ‘it’ seemed to me to be outside the scope of the anagram indicator ‘unhappy’, so I was expecting IT as such to appear somewhere, not to be scattered among the letters of A BRIDE. Am I to assume that this is OK? Would T..I be?
    1. Jean Martinet was (according to Chambers (2011)) “a French general in the reign of Louis XIV”.
      1. Thanks; it should have occurred to me that ‘martinet’ was an eponym.
  2. Good time, Dave. 75 minutes here – didn’t know Han as a river. My take on IN FULL, having read around a bit, is that it’s half of IF (ie the F) in NULL.
  3. 60 minutes give or take. Needed a bit of effort after the event to explain the rat in 1dn; it’s fictional from Conan D’oyle apparently.

    I can’t explain 6dn either. I thought of NULL as suggested by Ulaca but taking F (half of IF) from IN FULL would leave I NULL and I don’t see how that equals useless. Somebody in the Forum suggests that including only half of IN FULL leaves ILL = useless, but I’m not sure those two words are synonymous in any sense. Tony Sever says he has a better explanation, so let’s hope he turns up later either here or there to confirm what it is.

    Edited at 2013-05-05 07:09 am (UTC)

    1. What I mean, although it’s not tremendously convincing, is to take ‘useless’ (i.e. ‘null’) and ‘if’, and then include only half of ‘if’ in ‘null’, not moving the ‘i’ of ‘if’, so that it remains at the front.
      1. Thanks for clearing that up and sorry I misunderstood. I still think it’s a dodgy clue unless someone comes up with something different.

        Edited at 2013-05-05 08:48 am (UTC)

  4. No proper time for this, because I was also cooking while solving (macaroni cheese for my kids in my case) but I found it tough. Not as tough a this week’s though.
    The best I could come up with for 6dn was that half of IN FULL is NFU, which is an acronym meaning “useless”. Seems a bit too rude for the Sunday Times though!
    1. Well, it’s the best explanation so far giving us NFU one way and ILL the other, depending which “half of it is included”. If it’s not the correct explanation it deserves to be!

      And the ‘F’ can always be replaced by something milder such as ‘flipping’, after all we have had SNAFU previously where sensitive souls are free to substitute ‘fouled’ if they wish.

      Edited at 2013-05-05 12:45 pm (UTC)

  5. 13:32 here for a most enjoyable puzzle.

    I agree with ulaca’s reading of 6dn, which seems entirely satisfactory to me.

    My only cavil would be with “pompous” in 22ac since, as Kevin G. says, DIATRIBEs aren’t necessarily, or even frequently, pompous.

    1. This interpretation of 6D was the intended one.

      I wasn’t too worried by “pompous” – I’d say a diatribe was more likely to be pompous than the opposite.

      Peter Biddlecombe, Sunday Times Crossword Editor

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