Times 25,743

Author   topicaltimPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
I felt too tired last night to face the prospect of solving and blogging post-midnight; with hindsight, that was a good decision, as I found this pretty stretching even after a good night’s sleep. On the whole, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I didn’t enjoy it, more that I found it quite heavy going; clock stopped at 18:17, which was well outside my daily target of 2 Magoos, but still well up the leaderboard so far, which suggests I wasn’t alone.

Across
1 NEGATIVE – E.G. (as an illustration), in NATIVE(original). Of course, in these days of megapixels, young people will only know photo negatives as a way cool filter on their Instagram.
5 CLOVER – Left in COVER. Non-cricketers will be pleased that another definition of “cover” was used today, this one being “The amount of ground covered by a vertical projection of the vegetation, usually expressed as a percentage”.
9 BUTTRESS – BUT, TRESS. If you’re not a rugby fan, I imagine the surface may have passed you by entirely (both lock and prop are positions in the scrum).
10 ICARUS – cryptic def. Hmmm. I know some people have been rumbling about the use of cryptic definition clues recently; mainly, they will say, because several of them haven’t been any good. Perhaps this has made me sensitive to them, but this one certainly made me wince a little; if you were describing what happened to Icarus, you’d say his wings were exposed to the sun, never in the sun; obviously the language has to be changed to make the surface look as if it’s about someone being splashed across the pages of a tabloid, but it made the clue sound forced and odd to my ear. Maybe I’m being too picky and just over-analysing because being blogger of the day makes you look more closely than usual…
12 DRESS – double def., as in dressing a wound or dressing an actor, helped by the multiple meanings of “theatre”.
13 TEMPERING – double def. because the word itself is one of those odd ones which can have two completely contradictory meanings, depending on whether you are tempering steel or tempering justice with mercy, for instance.
14 FOURTH ESTATE – THE in FOUR(“crew”), STATE(“say”). In crosswords, the rowing crew is usually the full eight, but rowers operate as fours or pairs as well (though I’m not sure you can call two people a crew).
18 EXACERBATION – EX(“no longer”), ACE(“expert”), Bishop in RATION(“helping”).
21 BARCAROLE – BAR(“piece of music”), CAROL(“something sung”), European and a nice &lit., the whole thing being a traditional Venetian gondoliers’ song.
23 CLEAR – double def.
24 TALLIS – TALL, IS, as in “a tall story”. Composer Thomas Tallis was associated with royalty at the courts of both Mary and Elizabeth. This sprang quickly to mind because Radio 4 recently repeated a play about his associate William Byrd, and the suspicions of him as a covert Catholic traitor, in which Tallis featured.
25 ATLANTIS – AT, Length, ANTIS.
26 MAYHEM – if you MAY HEM, in the sewing sense, you are able to create a border.
27 LETHARGY – Husband in (GREATLY)*.
 
Down
1 NOBODY – as in a) Diary of a Nobody, and b) the answer to the schoolboy joke “Why didn’t the ghost go to the party?”.
2 GATHER – concealed in toGA THE Romans.
3 TURNSTONE – spelling out that flying directly away from the South-West would mean turning to the North-East. A bird which often features in puzzles, and which gets its name from its habit of looking for food under…well I expect you’ve guessed.
4 VISITORS BOOK – another cryptic def. It’s not awful, but I doubt it’s going to convert anyone to the cause who doesn’t already love them.
6 LUCRE – (CRUEL)*. Is there any sort apart from the filthy?
7 VERTICAL – V, (ARTICLE)*.
8 RESIGNED – double def.; the meanings are made clear if you consider the alternatives as perhaps RESIGNED and RE-SIGNED.
11 AMPHITHEATRE – A MP(“representative”) HIT(“ran into”) HEAT(“criticism”) RE(“about”).
15 SLOWCOACH – LOW(“humble”) inside [Secondary, COACH(“school”)].
16 VERBATIM – (VIBRATE)*, Mass.
17 FAIR PLAY – FAIR(“blonde”), PLAY(“theatrical performance”).
19 MENTOR – MEN TO Right &lit.
20 FRISKY – Female, RISKY.
22 ALIVE – Answer, LIVE(“as it happens”). I was slightly puzzled here, as I initially took “no longer quick” to mean “dead”, in fact I was 100% wrong, as it seems to mean “alive, but a word which is no longer used to mean that”, which seemed a little odd. Obviously, it depends how well you know “quick” as meaning “alive” – still used in the Church phrase “the quick and the dead”, or in biting one’s nails to the quick” – but I wouldn’t have thought the signal was needed in the way it is in Mephisto-land where obscure Spenserian words are part of the scenery. I was confused, anyway, but maybe that was just me.

60 comments on “Times 25,743”

  1. I’ve probably missed someone saying this already but I read this as quick (in this context)being archaic, i.e. we no longer use quick when we mean alive.

    John Mck

  3. Came to this after playing for eleven singing exams today and felt a bit brain dead so 20 mins seems quite reasonable. All musical theatre, so no Tallis. Bunged in dumb show without checkers just like Z. Back to the usual regime of strong coffee over breakfast tomorrow.
  4. I took just long enough dithering over 24ac to pass the half-hour, but since I didn’t get 24 right anyway, it hardly mattered. I knew TALLIS, and like John from Lancs love ‘Spem in Alium’, but I didn’t get the wordplay, and certainly wasn’t led to think of a composer by ‘Writer of stuff’. Agree with Jimbo about ICARUS. We must have had TURNSTONE before, or I wouldn’t have thought of it.

    Edited at 2014-03-25 04:25 pm (UTC)

  5. About 20 minutes for most of this, then 10 more on ALIVE/TALLIS. I finally got them both from wordplay, and looked up TALLIS to find out who he was. When I did, I was relieved a bit to know there really was a TALLIS, but describing him as ‘writer of stuff’ seems quite odd. I didn’t bother looking up ALIVE because I thought I knew what I’d find, and I certainly wouldn’t expect to find what others describe above. So to me, those last two are far more egregious than the CD’s today. But there were some high points here, NOBODY chief among them, so thanks to the setter and regards.
    1. I think this may let the setter off that particular hook:

      STUFF: Literary or artistic output or material; literary or artistic compositions collectively.

      That’s in the Shorter Oxford. I have to say though that I can’t find this meaning in any of the more usual sources for the Times Cryptic and I don’t recall ever meeting it before.

      1. That’s news to me, but thank you Jack for trying to help me/us out. “Stuff” as literary or artistic works clangs off my ear.
  6. I don’t have access to my SOED–does it give examples?–, but this seems like just an arbitrary example of the use of ‘stuff’: Tallis produced some great stuff, the new pitcher for the Yankees showed some great stuff in his first game, Macy’s has some great stuff in its lingerie department, … ‘Stuff’ is a ‘light’ noun, in the way that, say, ‘do’ is a light verb: when the painter does the bedroom, he paints its walls, when a burglar does the bedroom, he steals its valuables, etc., but ‘do’ does not have a definition ‘to paint walls’. I don’t see any reason to go from ‘writer of stuff’ to ‘writer of music’ as opposed to ‘writer of verse’ or ‘writer of philosophical essays’ for that matter.
    1. No, the entry is as posted above except it qualifies it as “now rare”. It’s listed as the 5th meaning of the noun.

      Edited at 2014-03-25 09:18 pm (UTC)

  7. I am surprised no-one mentioned the fact that the weak cryptic def for Icarus is almost identical to the one used in the “Guide to solving cryptic crosswords” that appears at the beginning of most of the Times crossword volumes.

    I say this bit from memory so am prepared to be contradicted, but it seemed to me that they used the same grid in a lot of the volumes 1 – 15 (I guess by now), so it must have had a lot of coverage.

    Maybe the pros on here have never bothered reading the guides!!

  9. 10:11 here for an interesting and enjoyable puzzle.

    I liked both CDs: although they were easy wins for old hands, they’re both neatly worded to give good surface readings. Anyway there’s nothing wrong with easy wins!

    I thought of ALIVE first time through, but didn’t put it in because (like others) I thought it didn’t match the definition. However, when I came to it again with the A and E in place (though no sign of Dr Thud), I reread the clue and realised that ALIVE was quite OK.

    I was a bit nervous about “writer of stuff for royalty” as the definition for TALLIS, and “early form of photo” as the definition for NEGATIVE, but with hindsight they’re both fair enough.

Comments are closed.