Across
1 DEBT – nice cryptic definition to get you going (or me finished).
3 PRIMA FACIE – anagram* of MP+AFRICA+IE (‘that is’).
10 EXCERPT – R in EXCEPT (= apart from = ‘bar’).
11 ROLL-OUT – a nice expression that has been hijacked by its widespread use in PR (also its marine equivalent ‘launch’), where nothing is safe from being ‘rolled out’.
12 LABOUR INTENSIVE – okay not hard but rather fun.
13 R+ANKLE
14 UNICYCLE – ICY in UNCLE.
17 COHESION CO + (NOISE+H) reversed.
18 A+BOUND
21 UNKNOWN QUANTITY – occurring in the alphabet after v and w, x, y and z are the ‘unknown quantities’.
23 STARTLE – R and L in STATE.
24 MATINEE – IN+TEAM* + E.
25 LAST RESORT – you get LAST RESORT by rearranging ‘salt’.
26 IDOL – ‘I DO’ + L.
Down
1 DUELLER – a CD that is definite COD material. Bravo/a, setter!
2 BACKBENCH – BACK+BENCH; in case anyone doesn’t know, a cabinet minister sits on the front benches, while the other MPs chunter on the back benches.
4 RETAIN – the literal is ‘keep’; the wordplay requires you to delete the first two letters from [he]re [ye]t [ag]ain.
5 MERITING – ‘earning’; TIN in ME+RIG.
6 FILING CABINETS – ‘office-holders’; FILING+CAB+I+NETS.
7 CROCI – CROC (with the disingenuous tears) + I; what Hyacinth Bucket calls crocuses?
8 EXTREME – hidden.
9 TROUBLESHOOTER – HER+TOO+SUBTLE+OR*.
15 CAUTIONED – an even easier anagram, perchance? EDUCATION*
16 COUNTESS – Has the setter run out of steam? It’s COUNTS outside (‘without’) E/S.
17 COUNSEL – I think so. It’s NO+CLUES*.
19 DRY CELL – double definiton, the second multivalent.
20 MURMUR – 2 x crosswordland’s favourite word for odd, reversed.
22 KEATS – either I’m missing something, or this doesn’t quite work; the literal is ‘poet’, so the wordplay is required to be K (‘Kipling initially’) + YEATS (‘then Yeats’). Since that gives ‘Kyeats’, I think we need some indication that Yeats needs to be beheaded. (Well, I dare say the smart money was on me missing something and the clue seems to work if one takes account of the potential for ellipsis in the text: K (‘like Kipling initially’) + EATS (‘then [like] Yeats’). Thanks to Jack, Sotira and Keriothe.)
I’ll be in conference for a while, so will clear up typos etc later.
I too was puzzled by 22 but reading it as ‘Poet, like Kipling initially, then (like) Yeats’ it sort of made sense to me.
There’s nothing wrong with ‘crocuses’ surely?
Edited at 2014-01-27 02:29 am (UTC)
Edited at 2014-01-27 03:02 am (UTC)
Nice to see the MATINEE IDOL in the SW corner.
Last in and COD to DUELLER. Very cunning. Puts one in mind of the Beeb’s latest enjoyable tosh The Musketeers (for which someone in the Guardian the other day came up with the wonderful new genre of ‘Baguette-i Western’).
Edited at 2014-01-27 02:43 am (UTC)
Good bits of clue writing in this one:
— “a bit of work” for the def in 10ac.
— “in case you may need one” for the def in 17dn.
— getting “taken out of context” to be (erm) taken out of context in 8dn.
— And, re the above problems, getting “first appearance of aircraft” to be the def rather than just the letter A. (Note to self: remember that TIN is money and that one meaning of ROUT is “disorderly retreat”.)
No idea how 22dn works. Nice time Ulaca!
Edited at 2014-01-27 04:20 am (UTC)
Didn’t help the cause by putting the US spelling DUELIST in for 1D to begin with! (they’ve been pushing the Three Musketeers on Sky TV)
But limped home, and not the slowest 600 for a change.
Also wasted time on EXTREME, where I actually looked for a hidden word but failed to see it. Can’t get much sloppier than that.
Happy to give KEATS my seal of approval, which will no doubt come as a great relief to the setter.
I too spent far too long on the last couple of words in the NW, ending with the 1s. KEATS in with a ?, RETAIN in with a tick, dnk that ROLL-OUT referred to aircraft. Note to self: ‘country’ doesn’t always mean the name of a specific country, Thanks for blogging!
I don’t like 1A – it simply isn’t accurate to say nobody wants debt. A modern economy can’t function without it and in times of high inflation it can be a real boon.
Like others I just don’t understand 22D – my last in
Good puzzle with no obscure words and some excellent surfaces / defs. Likewise wrote in KEATS without seeing the exact logic.
Although I saw 1ac straightaway, I needed checkers to be sure there wasn’t anything better, so it went from FOI to LOI! (I agree 1dn was COD.)
On first read-through of the acrosses IDOL was my FOI and I thought I was in for a stinker, but the checkers from that helped me complete the SE fairly quickly with the exception of MURMUR, which was actually my LOI, and after that I finally got onto the setter’s wavelength.
Having said that, I did think of DEBT immediately but waited until I solved either 1dn or 2dn before I was confident enough to enter it. I thought there were some good definitions, like “office-holders” for 6dn and “insincere mourner” for part of 7dn, and the clues for LAST RESORT and DUELLER were excellent.
Count me as another who was a little confused by the clue for KEATS.
Nice piece in the paper this morning (page 4) on the changeover of editors. “Mr Rogan is a particular fan of cryptic definitions”. You have been warned.
I didn’t understand KEATS (last in) when solving but now that I do I think it’s fine.
The definition of 1ac is just plain wrong, as anyone who knows how a leveraged buyout works will tell you.
1dn, on the other hand, is that rare thing, a very good CD.
Edited at 2014-01-27 11:48 am (UTC)
Like Keats, initially, then [like] Yeats
ie. like Keats in the initial position and thereafter like Yeats
Edited at 2014-01-27 12:14 pm (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation but if this is what the setter intended, I think that it is a poor clue.
I’m probably not helping…
A propos of nothing, the recent story about Cambridge Council removing apostrophes from street names in order to standardise them for the emergency services (haven’t they somehow coped up till now – regardless, people are painting them back in?) reminded me of the area I used to know which had Kipling Close, Shelley Close etc…and an abomination with the street sign proclaiming Keat’s Close.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/puzzles/crossword/article3986971.ece
And every best wish to Richard Browne as he takes up for his ‘retirement’ job as a setter. Anyone who ‘doesn’t get Mephisto’ is already ticking one box.
Edited at 2014-01-27 02:08 pm (UTC)
By the way, what are keat and yeat, and how do you kiple?
One for the teenagers, there.
Grump out…
Quite Mondayish, but a couple of crackers (even though I too prefer my DUELLIST).
http://patricknicholas.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/stacks_image_1.png
I liked it. Slow, steady solve with no requirement to know the names of obscure cricketers or the capitals of former African countries.
As for Keats being like Kipling, what’s orange and sounds like a parrot? A carrot. Ah well – it’s been a long day.
Today’s Award for Outstanding Stupidity goes to a gentleman from Sawston. You may have wondered why jars of rollmop herrings need to carry the words “Remove wooden skewer before consuming”. Well, I treated the answer this afternoon.
The poor chap probably interpreted the instruction as: “Remove wooden skewer before consuming it”. I blame the English language.
No problem with 22dn, which seemed just fine (if a little obvious).
I often suffer pangs of guilt at getting in the way of natural selection.
Today’s crossword had far too many German-style clues for my taste, I am sorry to say. Not bad clues necessarily, but you did have to point your mind in just the right direction and have the right associations with no second chance (for example in the clue for DEBT), whereas usually you simply must read the definitions very very carefully and there is always a second chance.
Worse than the Yeats clue, IMO.