22 minutes, of which an unwontedly large proportion was spent on 13 down.
Across | |
---|---|
4 | MAINSTAYS – guys as in guy-ropes. |
9 | AGINCOURT – NCO + ‘U’ inside A(rea)GIRT. |
10 | VERGE – (EG+REV) backwards; possibly a gap in my religious knowledge, but isn’t the verge, or virge, the symbol of…er, the verger? I started with MITRE before there were any checking letters, as it seemed more bishop-like. |
12 | BRISBANE – BRINE around (ABs)reversed. |
14 | REINSPECTION – REIN + S(P)ECTION; for non-UKers, Ofsted is the government office responsible for inspection of schools. |
17 | RIGHT-TO-LIFER – (IT FOR THE GIRL)*; a controversial topic. I liked the independent campaign of Kinky Friedman to be Texas governor; he ducked this thorny question by saying “I’m not pro-life, or pro-choice, I’m pro-football”. |
23 | TONDI – I’d only ever come across the singular TONDO and I admit I would have struggled to provide a convincing definition without Googling. |
24 | AITCHBONE – A(ITCH)+B(ritish)+ONE, part of the rump. |
25 | CHARTWELL – the name of Churchill’s country house in Kent, where he would paint and lay bricks to relax, in the days when politicians didn’t need to be seen to be doing something every hour of the week. |
Down | |
1 | QUARTERS – a cunningly inserted comma disguises the fact that ‘change’ is part of the definition, i.e. coins, and separate from “direction” = ‘QUARTER’, plus the ‘S’. |
3 | ROCKET SCIENTIST – (INTESTCRICKETSO)*. |
4 | MAUL – alternate letters in MeAnUgLy; pedantically, I don’t like the qualifier ‘rugby’ because a scrum on a rugby pitch has a specific definition and is quite distinct from a maul. Possibly this is just me. |
6 | SAVE SHOE LEATHER – bike riders don’t wear out their soles; Norman Tebbit famously referred to his father getting on his bike to look for work. |
7 | ABROAD – the Norfolk Broads would be the most famous. |
13 | GETHSEMANE – GET + (NAMES) reversed inside HE. |
16 | ERITREAN – (E)nglish(TERRAIN)*. |
19 | NARNIA – (IN + RAN) reversed + A, as famously featured in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. |
One of those where a certain amount of general knowledge was required, as well as the wordplay, though nothing too obscure in either, at least to a British readership. Nothing struck me as a stand-out for COD, but I’ll say 1dn because of the nice concealment of the definition.
P.S. Just back from a week’s holiday. Fortunately I only went as far as Paris, and didn’t require a mini Times World Atlas to get there 🙂
Not one of my better efforts but I very often run into difficulty when I know have limited time available to solve it. I was pleased at least to sort out all the LH side after a slow start.
One of those odd puzzles where on first reading there don’t seem to be many great clues; only going through them again do you realise there’s some fine wordplay at work. I’ll also go for 15D as COD but 12, 17, 18 and 21 all caught my eye.
Chartwell was first in – slight quibble here, surely a map MAKER would chart well?
Liked 21 but will go for the ultimately simple 20a as COD – when faced with a starting T and Model as the first word in the clue it’s easy to bark up several wrong trees before seeing the light.
Please don’t – I was smiling all the way through.