Times 25,540

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
15:39 on the club timer. Fans of economical clueing will like this one (it might almost be an exercise in using the least words possible for a Times daily), though the most concise clues are not always the most straightforward, of course. Quite a lot of knowledge required – whether you think it’s “general” or not probably depends on whether you already know it or not – including a plant, which I surprised myself by getting, and a boat which I deduced from wordplay. It also manages to be quite up to date (Father Ted, LOL, Man U) while retaining a reassuringly traditional Times feel (Wodehouse, German literary theory, the Old Testament).

Across
1 SETTLER – SETTLE, Rotherham. Settle is probably best known for the historic and famously scenic railway line to Carlisle.
5 OLD MAN – [LAKE,TED] in OMAN.
8 ENUNCIATE – (AUNT,NIECE)*.
9 SQUIB – QUI(“who” in French) in Sartre, Book.
11 NEPAL – (PEN)rev. + A Large. Nepal dispensed with its King in 2008.
12 TORMENTIL – TORMENT(=plague) + ILL. A member of the rose family, it seems.
13 HATCHERY – THATCHER, Year, the definition being “whence young”.
15 MANCHU – ChristchurcH in MAN U. The people from whom Manchuria gets its name…or, if you’re of an age, you may have just thought “Fu”.
17 EVENLY – EVELYN (Waugh) with the final N advanced in the word.
19 GREETING – double def., at least if you’re in Scotland.
22 EXCULPATE – EXE, (CAPULET)*.
23 SMEAR – double def. again.
24 SWING – another double def. Fans of staying up late for the UK General Election results will be familiar with Peter Snow and his swingometer (or modern equivalents).
25 BROADLOOM – (LOAD)* in BROOM.
26 AGATHA – A,GATH,A. Gath was the home of the ill-fated Goliath; the most formidable of Bertie Wooster’s aunts, described as “My Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.”
27 TUNED IN – DIN after TUNE.
 
Down
1 STERN-WHEELERS – STERN, With, HEELERS. Unknown to me (if you picture a Mississippi paddle-steamer, it’s one of those – obviously the sort with a single paddle wheel at the stern, rather than one on each side) and Last One In; though once I had the second word, it was a question of finding a word which fitted S_E_N, the definition “unrelenting” and sounded convincing as a boat, so had to be what it is, really.
2 TRUMPET – STRUMPET. I recall someone on Have I Got News For You describing the flighty Duchess of York as not a strumpet, more a strombone.
3 LOCAL – [SACK]rev. in LOL. I wondered if this was a debut for LOL, but it made an appearance over a year ago (reaction was mixed but my comment was that language inevitably evolves, and frankly I’d prefer LOL to the endless appearance of Beerbohm Tree and all the other cultural references which belong firmly in the Edwardian era).
4 REACTORS – RE: ACTORS.
5 O HENRY – HE in [ONLY with the Left changed to Right]. I don’t know how widely read or known O Henry is these days, though I am familiar enough with him (even if I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between him and his contemporary Saki in my memory). I await the replies saying “We read little else in our house / who on Earth is this man?”
6 DESPERATE – Squadron in (REPEATED)*.
7 AQUATIC – AQUA(“blue”, unless you’re an interior decorator), That Is, Cold. Teal is a breed of duck as well as being a colour (bluish-green this time), hence an aquatic bird.
10 BILDUNGSROMAN – (MORIBUNDSLANG)*; the coming-of-age novel.
14 HALF-LIGHT – HALT,FLIGHT.
16 FREEPOST – FREE(vacant)POST(situation).
18 ETCHING – FETCHING without the Female. Very witty clue; many an attractive female has received an invitation to come up and see some etchings…
20 ICE-COLD =”I SCOLD”.
21 BALBOA – [A LB.] in BOA. Not Rocky, but Vasco, first European to reach the Pacific coast of America.
23 SEDAN – Daughter in SEAN.

49 comments on “Times 25,540”

  1. I could see where 1dn was going, and got the STERN bit but couldn’t complete it. I’ve never heard of O HENRY, Scottish GREETING or FREEPOST. But I’m sure they are all Absolutely General Knowledge.
  3. Struggled! But got there in the end. All the trouble in the very difficult SW. GATH will have to go on my list of things to remember. (And then promptly forget.)

    So it was “assEgai” yesterday. To quote the great Shankly: we was robbed.

    Off now to find a fetching strumpet.

  4. Quarter of an hour is a cracking time. I had to cheat on four, including both long downs…and SWING, which gets my COD.

    I’ve never read a word of Wodehouse, put off by just the kind of line TT quotes.

    2. Oh, but you’re missing a treat. How about these?

      “The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!'”

      “It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.”

  5. 25 minutes but with a next-door-key typo that I failed to spot. That and putting the first letter in the second space makes online solving hazardous.
    I found this tough, and the LOI plant went in when I finally thought of a synonym for plague. I thought a BILDUNGSROMAN, which I made up from the anagrist and scraps of memory, had to be a graphic novel, Bild being “picture” and all. Spent too long wondering why WHEELERS were cobblers. FREEPOST™ looks suspiciously like advertising – the thin end of the wedge?
    Only really knew the Rocky of the Philadelphia Balboas, but the name might as well have a history. I’ve learned today that it wasn’t Stout Cortés who first stood on a peak in Darien wildly surmising. Somehow that smarts.
    CoD to that charmingly silly ICE COLD, so reminiscent of the schoolboy’s iced ink
  6. This took the best part of an hour to complete under my new regime. Lot’s of unknowns or forgottens today including STERN-WHEELERS, lampoon/SQUIB, TORMENTIL, GATH, BALBOA and BILDUNGSROMAN. I enjoyed ‘reunion’ as anagram indicator as it seems so obvious yet I don’t recall meeting it before and it doesn’t appear in Chambers’ extensive list.

    O’HENRY was known to me from THE O’HENRY PLAYHOUSE, 39 TV dramas based on his works made in the US in 1957 and shown in the UK by the BBC.

    Incidentally the ‘swingometer’ on TV dates from same era and was most associated with the Canadian psephologist Robert “Bob” McKenzie who popularised it some 20 years before Peter Snow took it over.

    Edited at 2013-07-30 06:26 am (UTC)

  7. Yes, the swingometer and co. are maybe taking over the Heath Robinson spot from Bond films. 40 rather gritty minutes here, not helped by writing O. Henry in at 5 across. Got so squinty-eyed that couldn’t see straight and took forever to get Greeting. Good to see the Iron Lady duly canonised.
  8. Excellent time Tim for a knotty sort of puzzle that readily gave very little away. As others have said the SW corner is tough with 1D an unknown and so needing a guess and 13A difficult to parse.

    I also didn’t know the book at 10D so had to work back from checkers and a guess that ROMAN was at the end and BILD at the front.

    But I knew O HENRY! And can recommend some of his wonderful short stories if you haven’t come across them. The one about the girl selling her hair to buy a watch chain for her boyfriend whilst he sells the watch to buy hair slides for her is very thought provoking.

      1. For some reason, I had to unspam your reply. The spammers are out in force today.
          1. It’s the embedded link that does it every time so there’s nothing to be done about it without admin rights. But don’t let that stop you, as there’s always someone around to rescue genuine contributions that get spammed in error.
  9. A 30 min struggle and I had to check Chambers for my LOI, BILDUNGSROMAN.

    I found this to be a curious mix of the cleverly disguised (e.g. ENUNCIATE and DESPERATE), the “should have been easy but I tried to over-analyse the wordplay” (e.g. SETTLER and GREETING), and the previously unknown and difficult (e.g. 1dn and 10dn).

  10. DNF today with Stern-Wheelers missing and wrong guesses at O’Hearn for O’Henry and Torrentil for Tormentil.
    The SW quadrant was tough without the starting letters from ‘wheelers’. FOI Sedan. Agatha, Bildungsroman and Broadloom from wordplay.
    Liked LOL in Local.
    RE Hatchery. I don’t remember seeing Baroness Thatcher referenced in a Times cryptic before. Maybe her first time?
    1. I think it is her first time, yes.
      It’s a good idea to try and install an app in your brain that rings a little bell whenever you see the word “with” in a crossword. Mine probably saved me five minutes today.
      1. With for w and piece for gun are on my must-remember list, which I must remember to look at occasionally. Ulaca
      2. Good tip – thank you.
        I remember ‘and’ appears as a synonym for ‘with’ from time to time.
        1. Indeed. The thing about clues like 1dn is that it’s natural to assume “with” is just joining the two parts of the clue, which leaves you looking for a word for “cobblers” fitting ?H?E?E?S. Once you’ve spotted that “with” might be W you get WH?E?E?S. As so often the presence of a W (not the most common letter) makes life vastly easier.
  11. 18m.
    Quite a few things I didn’t know in here, but the wordplay was all clear, if not easy. Super puzzle I thought.
    Tim, I’m with you 100% on LOL vs. Beerbohm Tree.
  12. Such a relief to find that everyone else had trouble with this one too. I did finish in 21:42 but with a considerable amount of headscratching along the way.
  13. An excellent puzzle, requiring much tricky parsing and an unusually wide range of GK, ranging from a type of paddle-steamer, through an obscure plant and a B-list explorer, to Wodehouse, O. Henry and German literary terminology. So something for everybody, I guess.

    Like Sotira, I thought HATCHERY particularly good. Baroness T is presumably now fair game for xword reference because she’s dead? Is that the convention? If so, it’s a convention that doesn’t seem to be invariably observed. A retired but still-living former senior politician appeared as a solution in a recent ST cryptic.

    Keats, in his poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, committed a famous schoolboy howler by crediting Balboa’s compatriot Cortez with being the first European to cross the isthmus of Panama and set eyes on the Pacific: “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He stared at the Pacific – and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise – /Silent, upon a peak in Darien”.

    I discovered O. Henry’s short stories in my late teens, and much enjoyed them, but have haven’t ready any for many years. Time for a return visit perhaps.

    1. It’s only the Times daily cryptic that bars the living. They regularly appear in the Sunday cryptic and Mephisto
      1. Thanks Jimbo (and Anon). I’d misunderstood the convention – I didn’t realise it was confined to the Times daily cryptic.
  14. 32:26 but like Daniel I went for torrentil, thinking locusts when it came to plague.

  15. Another puzzle with some interesting vocab. And, as TT alludes to, not one clue longer than a line.
  16. Mike, different ‘rules’ apply to Times and ST offerings, so all is in order if you find living folk, or Jiang Zemin, in the latter.
  17. Very interesting vocab, though quite a lot of it beyond me I’m afraid. Over an hour!

    Cheers
    Chris.

  18. O HENRY is buried less than a mile from my apartment (I had nothing to do with it) so I smiled when I saw him appearing. Did this late last night and it took two pints, so in the middle range. Took me about 18 anagram attempts to get BILDUNGSROMAN but I finally had the right version in there. STERN WHEELERS from wordplay. Nice puzzle! Wonder if the setter was shooting for a pangram originally, it seems to be a J,K and Z short.
  19. About 40 minutes, so on the tougher side. Some went in quite freely, but I got held up on STERN-WHEELERS, the long German book, and finally remembered GREETING’s other meaning and that led to my LOI, the unknown FREEPOST from wordplay. I agree the COD goes to HATCHERY; ‘whence young’ is elegantly written. Regards.
  20. If n advances then surely it goes further to the right, not to the left?
    1. I imagine the explanation would be that originally N was 6th letter, and it’s now moved up to 4th, so in that respect it’s gone “up the order”. Of course, it works equally well the opposite way, as you suggest, so the setter can have it both ways (though I don’t think we can begrudge them that once in a while).
  21. 9:09 for me – leaving me feeling a bit old and slow as there was a time when I’d have zipped through a puzzle like this one. (Sigh!)
  22. This puzzle perfectly illustrates why I no longer ener the Times Championship. I could have juggled with the anagram of BILDUNGSROMAN until September without having the foggiest idea whether I’d unjumbled it correctly. It’s The Times FFS, not Die Welt.

    As for the use of LOL in 3D…….disgraceful.

    Disgusted sexagenarian, Manchester.

    2. If you’ve not heard of BILDUNGSROMAN you probably don’t deserve to do all that well in the Championship I’d have said.
      Sorry to be rude, but just replyng in kind
  23. Having decided not to rush at it, I completed the puzzle without aids in 36m 12s, though I had not fully parsed 1d or 15a. Regarding Bildungsroman, although a foreign word in origin, it is widely used in English Literature studies (think Jane Eyre).
    While I have read only a little of O’Henry, I am old enough to remember the weekly treat of ‘The Cisco Kid’ on television, who was referred to as ‘The Robin Hood of the Old West’, so for those of the same vintage as myself, ‘O Pancho’.
    George Clements
    1. Hello, George. Thanks for reminding me that Cisco Kid was created by O’Henry. I remember now he was mentioned in the voice-over at the beginning of each episode: “Here’s Adventure! Here’s Romance! Here’s O’Henry’s Robin Hood of the Old West! The Cisco Kid!”

      Happy days.

      ‘Let’s went!’

  24. Some days the comments are more entertaining than the crossword. About a draw today. Get a life ‘disgusted’, or should it be GAL
    1. I have a life thanks ! I would have thought that spotting the FFS in my comment would have made the use of irony fairly obvious…….

      Disgusted S (etc ad nauseam)

      1. You complain about LOL having already used FFS. Not so much irony as killing your own argument I’d have said

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