Sunday Times 5164 by Robert Price

Author   keriothePosted on Categories Weekend Cryptic

17:45. Another excellent puzzle, and one I found quite challenging. There are a few clues in here with very tricky wordplay which was fun to unravel. More generally the difficulty did not come from the obscurity of the vocab, which is how I like it. How did you get on?

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (TIHS)*, deletions like this, anagram indicators are in italics.

Across
1 Leading journalists drink squash
SUPPRESS – SUP, PRESS.
5 Gray’s second compendium mostly contains elegies
DIRGES – DI(gRay)GESt.
9 Rider and daughter finish in a ditch almost
ADDENDUM – A, D(D, END)UMp.
10 Aim a bit higher than the church?
ASPIRE – A SPIRE is a bit (part) higher than (the rest of) a church.
12 Latest report by old newspaper character
STATE-OF-THE-ART – STATE, O, FT, HEART. HEART and ‘character’ both mean something akin to courage. Collins gives ‘moral force’ for the latter. ODE has ‘strength and originality in a person’s nature’.
14 Hotel auditor’s legal documents
RITZ – sounds like ‘writs’.
15 Hand stopping a ball going in
ADMITTANCE – A, D(MITT)ANCE.
17 Book about Hearts initially exaggerated their goal tally
SCORESHEET – S(CORES)HE, Exaggerated, Their. This novel by Rider Haggard used to be a crossword regular, but you see it less often these days for some reason. I always get it mixed up with Sybil and can never remember who wrote which.
19 Italy’s capital missing from simple map
PLAN – PLAiN.
22 Climber’s knot — guess if he got tangled
FIGURE OF EIGHT – FIGURE (guess), (IF HE GOT)*. I didn’t know that this was a knot.
24 Key bank bond held by a third party
ESCROW – ESC, ROW.
25 Mature, since working for model employers
AGENCIES – AGE, (SINCE)*.
26 Lecture dealing with India partitioning
TIRADE – T(I)RADE. I happen to be listening right now to the episodes of the excellent Empire 2dn about partition. Absolutely horrific.
27 Firstly, scout acquires inside info about reserves
NEST EGGS – tricky wordplay here: a reversal (about) of Scout, G(GETS)EN.
Down
1 Sewer rats seem out of place aboard ship
SEAMSTRESS – SS containing (RATS SEEM)*.
2 Audio streamed from school pitch
PODCAST – POD, CAST.
3 Make, supply or apply plaster
RENDER – triple definition.
4 Pompous type, loaded, ill-tempered mostly
STUFFED SHIRT – STUFFED, SHIRTy.
6 Nits spread by insects and ticks
INSTANTS – (NITS)*, ANTS. As in ‘I’ll just be two ticks’.
7 Not all reading list entries are brilliant
GLISTEN – contained in ‘reading list entries’.
8 Large number rubbed out
SLEW – DD.
11 At sea each lounge is somewhere to relax
CHAISE LONGUE – (EACH LOUNGE IS)*.
13 Welfare checks statesmen forced on society
MEANS TESTS – (STATESMEN)*, S. The American spelling of ‘checks’ in the surface reading is a bit of a giveaway here.
16 Golf club contracted with another in China
WEDGWOOD – WEDGe, WOOD. Not a friend, for a change.
18 Cop turned killer in LA?
OFFICER – OFF (turned, as in cream), ICER.
20 Falling behind insulation
LAGGING – DD.
21 Note that’s upset a Cheshire constituent
RENNET – reversal of TENNER. Cheshire is a cheese here of course. My last in.
23 Help to lower a pulse
BEAT – ABET with the A lowered to third place.

24 comments on “Sunday Times 5164 by Robert Price”

  1. I remember DIRGES being particularly hard and this one in general taking a good while.
    Sybil, of course, though a work of fiction (as it emerged), was not marketed as a novel.

  2. Thanks to these blogs (and comments), I’ve now cottoned on to the fact that Robert Price is consistently putting a pun across the top of his puzzles.

    (And/or somewhere else).

    So for this one we have SUPPRESS DIRGES = “suppressed urges”.

    Interesting/entertaining blog – particularly about the book “She”, and the Empire podcast.

    1. Yes I should have mentioned this!
      SUPPRESS DIRGES TIRADE (to raid) NEST EGGS.

  3. As someone born and bred in Cheshire you’d think I would have twigged to ‘cheese’ sooner than I did. Never got to see too many ‘tenners’ in my wage packet either. Didn’t notice the spelling of ‘checks’, just assumed that welfare checks were another way of determining monetary assistance eligibility. Liked WEDGWOOD but I’ve never noticed that it’s spelt that way, missing the second ‘E’ in wedge. Biffed STATE-OF-THE-ART from checkers. Liked ASPIRE for the bit above the church.
    Didn’t see Suppressed Urges in 1 & 5a, thanks Peter W. COD to DIRGES.
    Thanks K and setter.

      1. Yes, thanks. I saw the parsing and got the answer. What I meant was is that I’d never noticed that spelling before after seeing Wedgwood in shop windows for years.

        1. It’s odd, isn’t it? I have noticed it before, but quite recently. Probably because it appeared in a crossword.

          1. And Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, same spelling. Would be interesting to know its derivation.

  4. I liked this puzzle a lot. Pity l made two blunders when entering it.
    My favourite clues were DIRGES, SCORESHEET and NEST EGGS.
    I’m pretty sure we’ve had several references to Henry Rider Haggard in The Times weekend cryptics over the past couple of years.
    Suppressed Urges – thanks Peter W. Thanks keriothe.

  6. I was stuck for a long time on the last few in – ESCROW, which I’ve only heard of in crosswords and had forgotten, DIRGES, which took me a while to parse, even after thinking of the answer and SLEW, my LOI, where an alphabet trawl was required. SHE was one of my favourite books as a child – I read widely across my father’s bookshelves and therefore absorbed a great many authors who would be considered ‘unsuitable’ nowadays because of their British Empire outlook on the world.
    I think ‘checks’ in 12d has nothing to do with money – I remember my parents being means tested when I went to university to determine what size of grant I was entitled to receive (the minimum, but they kindly made up the difference as they were expected to!).

    1. Your point about ‘checks’ is obviously true for the definition but I think the setter is trying to make us think of ‘cheques’ in the surface reading. Perhaps not.

      1. He’d have to spell it “checks,” though, if that is the definition. You can’t “cheque on” anyone or anything.

          1. I didn’t think of cheques when I read the clue, but see that Collins has an entry for WELFARE CHECKS in that—marked as American—sense. (Merriam-Webster doesn’t define the phrase.) My first thought was a home visit by a social worker or law enforcement (as the AI answer has it), which I can, however (in our current climate), more readily imagine the government cutting the funds for. Alternative term for “wellness check.”
            (Sorry, I thought momentarily that you meant the setter had a choice in the spelling.)

  7. 25.35

    Struggled to get going on this but once I got a toehold it flowed pretty nicely.

    Particularly liked/impressed by CHAISE LONGUE and MEANS TESTS. Not hard ones but very neat.

    Thanks Robert and Keriothe particularly for the parsing of SCORESHEETS.

  8. Thanks keriothe and Robert Price.
    5a Dirges, I had ?? by this, I think because I never thought of DIGESt for compendium. Thanks keriothe.

  9. Many thanks for the much-needed blog. Had a fair crack at this but still well above current ability. Needed help with SCORESHEET and MEANS TEST and could parse neither DIRGES nor NEST EGGS. Much enjoyed. Thanks K and setter.

  10. Another top class ST crossword. Some fine setters, they have at present.
    K, Sybil is by Benjamin Disraeli. It was a “Novel with a purpose,” and is one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read.

    1. I know that, of course. I can just never quite remember who wrote which. In particular I have a tendency to think that Disraeli wrote She.

      1. Ha. Obviously, I never heard of the Disraeli book. The only Sybil I know was about someone with the supposed “multiple personality syndrome”—which was turned into a TV movie starring Sally Field!

  11. Couldn’t parse SCORESHEET and got into no end of trouble in the SE before ‘upset-ting’ TENNER – then loi 27ac became possible.
    I’ll keep an eye out for the puns – thanks Peter W.

  12. Yes, a good hint for some extra fun on Sunday parsing! Right down here in the Antipodes, we don’t know what sort of suppressed urges are referred to ( with regard to raiding nest eggs), but we had a run on saved superannuation to cover the miserable wages the working class folk were getting in order for them to make ends meet. Maybe the same. I enjoyed this, but had to look up a few:DIRGES, SCORESHEET, MEANS TESTS and SLEW ( not a word I’ve ever used, because it doesn’t echo its meaning.). Good, enjoyable solving for the rest, though.

  13. Thanks Robert and keriothe
    Did this one last Sunday, but only got around to checking it off now – to find that my SHED at 8d was wrong (probably more like ‘shedloads’ for large number although not that big a stretch for it to mean get rid of) – anyway it was wrong !
    Missed the parsing of both STATE OF THE ART and SCORESHEET, so thanks for explaining. Didn’t have any trouble with DIRGES or NEST EGGS though.
    Read the novel “She” after seeing it in crosswords so many times quite a number of years ago – and enjoyed it.
    Finished in the NW corner with RENDER, ADDENDUM (which took a while to see the word play) and PODCAST the last one in.

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