Times 24,094

Author   richardvgPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

Solving time: 13:42

This was very enjoyable and seemed rather tricky. The last three to go in for me were 1A and 1D, and of course the cricket reference at 28A.

I was pleased to get 7D quickly, as I was accepted by Jesus a few decades ago at this time of year. But my favourite clue today is 11A, which almost had me laughing out loud in the underground this morning.

Across

1 W(HEAT)EAR – tricky, with “migrant” meaning migratory bird, and “sport” meaning wear
5 ALUMNA – it was only as I wrote this in as the only possible anagram that I recognised it as the feminine of alumnus
10 OF THE FIRST WATER – (AFTER SHIFT WROTE)*
11 PUTTO SH AME(n), “amen” being clued by the answer to 12 – brilliant
13 SIN + E
15 (h)E(ME)RALD
17 A G(ood) ROUND – I wasted time looking for AG to be sandwiched by a word meaning “supply of”
18 C(HAND)OS – The first Duke of Chandos was Handel’s patron
19 D(uk)E + MEANS
21 (m)ANTI(s)
25 MOONLIGHT SONATA – which is in C-sharp “minor”. The end of the clue indicates “moonlight”.
27 RADIAN(t) – Not sure about the “from” as link word here. I would be happy with From+[wordplay]+[def], but From+[def]+[wordplay] seems odd.
28 BODY + LINE

Down

2 (l)EFT
3 TREMOLANDO – (MODERN ALTO)*
4 APIS + H
6 LAWN – two meanings. A hyphen (rather than a dash) to divide definition from wordplay is something I expect in the Guardian rather than the Times
7 M + ATRICULATE, being ARTICULATE with the T taken up (As suggested in a comment below, I should spell out that Jesus is not a religious reference here, but means Jesus College at Oxford or Cambridge)
8 AI(RHEA)D
9 I SAMBA + RD
12 THE LAST WORD … of Hamlet is when Fontinbras says “Go, bid the soldiers shoot“
14 PRO MONT(O.R.)Y
16 D(1’S L)ODGE
20 S(ANT)A FE – state capital of New Mexico
23 DITTO – cryptic definition
24 FLEA (=”flee”)
26 ALI – hidden, and I think &lit. I don’t know much about Ali but it seems his gravesite was secret for some time

41 comments on “Times 24,094”

  1. I thought this was a great puzzle – tough but fair and enjoyable. Unlike yesterday’s, it was pretty even in difficulty, and when the going got tough I was inspired to continue (instead of falling asleep).

    About 45 mins in the end, but I spent quite a while on 13ac thinking that “pi” must be the transcendental number rather than “e”.

    I’ll reserve any more comments or questions until the blog has been posted.

  2. I found this one quite tricky with a number of words and an expression I had not heard of before. I won’t display my ignorance further by going into detail on these! 28 minutes of properly timed solving did for about three-quarters of it and another 20 minutes in dribs and drabs polished off the gaps on the RH side.

    I wonder how well-known the Duke of Chandos is. I’m not sure I would know him but for his patronage of G.F. Handel and his long-gone mansion at Canons Park near where I used to live.

  3. Easily the best puzzle of the week so far – 35 minutes to solve.

    I think we should explain for overseas solvers that being “accepted by Jesus say” is a reference to Jesus College and not a religious reference. I liked the maths references, which made a nice change and even an engineer with Brunel at 9D.

    Not so keen on “in Hamlet the last word”, not clear to me why I should be expected to know this (or the last word in any other work come to that)

    1. Agree about the clueing of SHOOT – in the current RSC production, it’s not the last word anyway, as Fortinbras has no lines – just appears on stage and stands there looking uncomfortable.

      13 mins, slowed slightly by carelessly entering PROMENTORY and pondering briefly the possible achievements of the little known African general Menty.

  4. I found this one tricky, with an annoying 6- or 7-minute period in the middle where I was completely stuck. Got there in the end in 21:45. CHANDOS was new to me but easy enough to get from wordplay. I agree with Richard about the COD, although I used the obvious AME(n) to get 12D rather than the other way around.
  5. The first I have not completed in a long time.I considered both “wheatear” for 1Ac and “Apish” for 4 Dn, but couldn’t comfortably enter either of them. Having now dug further, I accept 4 Dn, but feel 1 Ac is weak.
  6. I found this quite tricky after a smooth start, but didn’t take any longer than yesterday to complete (35 minutes). I’ve not heard the expression in 10, so although I had it provisionally worked out from the anagram fodder very early on, I was uncertain until the end. WHEATEAR was also new to me, so that and APISH were the last to go in. 7 and 11 were very clever clues. Lots to enjoy here.
  7. After breezing through yesterday I had to resort to aids to finish this after 45 minutes – couldn’t see OF THE FIRST WATER which was keeping me from getting 4, 9, 6, and 7 down.
  8. I didn’t enjoy this one much, although some of the clues turned out to be really good. I agree with Jimbo that expecting us to know the last word of any play is utterly ridiculous. At 10a I’d immediately worked out the the jumble of letters could make “of the first water” but dismissed it as a nonsense phrase. Accepted by Jesus went way over my head too. Other things I haven’t heard of are APIS, the second Lawn def, TREMOLANDO and Putto. I have heard of CHANDOS but don’t know why. Not keen on defining WHEATEAR just as “migrant”. Lots of excellence in the rest.
    I somehow managed to solve the whole lot without any help though a calendar would be more useful than a stopwatch today.
    1. Perhaps The CHANDOS, a very well known pub in Trafalgar Square? I think this is why I knew the answer almost immediately.
  9. I see lawn = green as the first part of this DD, but am stumped by the second part: sleeves composer.
    Please explain.
    Barbara
    1. Lawn is a fabric, and lawn sleeves are worn by Anglican bishops, especially when sitting in the House of Lords; so the sleeves are composed of …..

      Harry Shipley

  10. About 40′ for me and one short at 5ac, having inexplicably missed the anagram completely.

  11. Harry: Thanks for the explanation. It’s amazing how I learn something new almost every time I do a puzzle.
    Barbara
  12. 24:40 … Fairly pleased with that time after a first run-through yielded merely EFT and MOONLIGHT SONATA. The “This is a difficult puzzle and you may need to start thinking a little more obliquely” message took about ten minutes to penetrate my skull. After that, I really enjoyed it.

    Last in, appropriately, was THE LAST WORD, which I pretty much guessed at. Looking up the play’s last line after solving, I was rather disappointed to find it wasn’t:

    “You mean Hamlet’s snuffed it? Oh, shoot!”

    COD .. 14d PROMONTORY

  13. More than a little difficult! 1 hour, and pleased with that, only to find that I had both 5ac and 6d wrong (though, to be fair I was never that sure about either!) We had it coming, I suppose, after an easyish week so far. COD? I’ve got a soft spot for both 28ac and 17ac.
  14. 12.53, 1 mistake. Was chugging along quite happily with this till I got to 6d after about 9 minutes and ground to a total halt. I simply could NOT see what I was supposed to do with Green-sleeves. Wrote down everything that looked feasible; LAWN was my second choice because of the greenness, but I actually went for LOWE, which sounded like a composer, and had possibilities for the wordplay to be something I was missing altogether like the centre of fLOWEr.
    1. I thought intitally that they may have misspelled it, the composer (“My Fair Lady” et al) is Frederick Loewe (Alan Lerner wrote the lyrics)

      For a brilliany performance of the Loewe song “I Remember it Well” from “Gigi”, click here if you dare

  15. 14.23 which felt like a good time after a sluggish start, and some pretty tough clues.Pleased to see I was not the only one to be bamboozled by the second LAWN definition,I liked 1a although it might have been easier if defined as bird or flier instead of migrant.
    Had never heard of GOLDEN MEAN.
    Excellent puzzle.
    JohnPMarshall
  16. Almost an hour; all spent on an icy train platform. glherd – how much time can I deduct on the basis that chemical reactions run slower in the cold?

    Very much in agreement with Kurihan – lots of interesting stuff to maintain interest.

    I tend to agree with most of the comments above, so I’ll restrict myself to commenting on 27A.

    Those who regularly work with angles will know that about the only time you see 1 radian is when you’re converting to or from degrees. In that sense ‘From a certain angle’ works okay as very loose kind of definition.

  17. Although I managed to finish this I completely lost track of time in the process. It was a stuttering solve anyway and I’ll guess the total was around a shocking hour all told.

    No real complaints although I agree with the stretch of knowledge needed for 12D. I spent an awful amount of time looking for container wordplay and only saw the light after visiting here. I’m pretty weak on Shakespeare (along with other literature/knowledge/logic etc).

    Q-1 E-7 D-9 COD 27 – I’m happy with the reversed order of clue elements; “from this answer you can get this wordplay” doesn’t trouble me.

  18. 13:45. I enjoyed this puzzle too. We had a couple of first / last words of plays or other texts in 23904 and 23908 back in May. Not very popular then either, but this time there was at least some extra help from 11A.

    I also got CHandos by way of the pub or possibly the (classical) record label.

    1. I’m a little surprised that the editor allows them in this form. He is, after all, the guy who put a stop to clues such as: “Go, bid the soldiers ….. (Hamlet)(5)”. We even effectively had one in Mephisto a couple of weeks ago “a one-horse …. (Buchan, Greenmantle)(4)”
      1. The old-style quotation clues like this were not stopped by Richard Browne, the current crossword editor, but by Brian Greer when he took over from John Grant in 1995.
  19. All except 12D in about an hour. Got it into my head that “hamlet shoot” was an anagram. It wasn’t!Got 11A but don’t know what “putto” is. Can anyone help?
  20. According to Wikipedia:

    The putto (pl. putti) is a figure of a pudgy human baby, almost always male, often naked and having wings, found especially in Italian Renaissance art. The figure derives from Ancient art but was “rediscovered” in the early Quattrocento. These images are frequently, and erroneously, confused with cherubim.[1]

  22. I’m pleased to say I actually finished this, but needed aids at the end, and it took well more than an hour. I solved (i.e.guessed), but didn’t understand ‘the last word’ bit til coming here, and agree it’s not good. Same guessing without understanding for lawn as a fabric for sleeves, putto. I also think wheatear clued only as ‘migrant’ is obscure, and I never heard of radian. And, as one of the overseas contingent, let me hoist the white flag on account of: Jesus College, Chandos, all things cricket, Monty(not really hard, but going straight to the nickname should have been hinted at) and, the cake-taker, Isambard. Wow. Defined as ‘associated with Kingdom’, no mention of bridges, engineering, anything? Wow again. All that said, thanks Setter, we all need our brains stretched every so often, and I gratefully acknowledge the lob to the N Americans with Santa Fe. Regards.
    1. Just to be clear for anyone else outside the UK baffled by this one, his full name was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He’s the only famous person I can think of to have ‘Kingdom’ in his name. (‘Isambard’ is shared with his father, Sir Marc I B.)
  23. No one else seems to have raised this, but doesn’t there need to be a comma both before and after “say” in 7dn if we are to take “say” as meaning “for example”? A second comma would, I appreciate, require some re-jigging of the rest of the clue, but is there not a convention that, however misleading, the wordplay has to work grammatically? Perhaps Peter B or one of the other Ximenean authorities can enlighten me.

    I expected that the literary reference at 12dn would elicit a snort of disgust from jimbo (and was happily not disappointed!). It would, indeed, be ridiculous to expect anyone to “know the last word of any play”. But, in a slightly different but important sense, Hamlet is not any play but the most famous one in the language, and its last line might reasonably be expected to be known to quite a few people. The brilliant link to 11ac justifies 12dn for me.

    Like quite a few others, I found this a tough but highly enjoyable puzzle, with some delightful surface readings (e.g. 25ac). Deeply impressd by all who managed a sub-15min time. I lost count – but must have taken at least 1hr.

    Michael H

    1. I don’t know everything about the Ximenean rules, but my defence of the clue would be that “To be accepted by Jesus, say” is a valid def. I don’t think there’s any requirement to punctuate “post def” in the usual way. And of course if you have a comma after “say”, the surface meaning is so ruined that anyone working by such a rule would have to rewrite the clue or find a different approach.
      1. I had an exclamation mark against the clue. I really agree with Michael on this. It feels like the setter wanting it both ways. The moment you start to get a sense of the true meaning of the clue, the grammar falls apart, and the clue with it. It’s a great attempt, but for me not a great clue.
  24. A lovely puzzle. although tough i enjoyed it
    thougth some of the cluse were obscure! but fair!
  25. By the way – Thanks to Peter B and sotira for their comments on whether the absence of a comma after “say” in 7dn of yesterday’s puzzle invalidated the use of “say” to indicate that Jesus was an example of a college. Glancing this morning at Chapter 4 of Tim Moorey’s excellent How to Master The Times Crossword, I see that No 7 of his Tips for Solving Clues is headed “Ignore punctuation”. He writes: “In a nutshell, only exclamation marks and question marks are meaningful in clues; other punctuation should usually be ignored”. The rule seems therefore to be that punctuation should make normal sense in the surface reading but should (apart from the exceptions Tim mentions) be ignored in the cryptic reading. Must try and remember that.

    Michael H

  26. We had WHEATEAR in a puzzle not so long ago as I remember relating a tale from by our guide on a recent visit to Cape Wrath that the name is a gentrified version of WHITEARSE as it has a conspicuous white rump when in flight.

    This was another really good one – like yesterdays – that was completed unaided in the morning after being started the previous evening.

    There are 3 “easies”:

    22a Perfect compromise when angel and demon fall out? (6,4)
    GOLDEN MEAN. Anagram of (angel demon). Didn’t know it meant compromise – the philosophical rather than mathematical meaning.

    1d Sort of cushion made with great enthusiasm (7)
    WHOOPEE. As in “making whoopee”.

    18d One working with snake – cold, dangerous thing (7)
    C HARMER

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