ACROSS
1 ALLIGATOR – A + GILL reversed + A + TOR
6 PIQUE – sounds like ‘peak’; to pique is to aggravate.
9 LOSE ONES FOOTING – LOOTING around an anagram* of FEES + SO + ON
10 TUBING – [Alan] TURING with a B[lack] for the R.
11 PARTAKEN – the literal is ‘shared’, derived from P(ART)A + KEN .
13 VITUPERATE – not a word I use every day; ‘worried about’ needs to be subject to a bit of lifting-and-separating, since it indicates that VIPER + ATE go round TU (‘Trades Union’)
14 FILM – double definition, one starring either Caine or Law, depending on your generation
16 ROOM – ‘moor’ reversed
17 HEBRAISTIC – definitely the toughest of the bunch, as evidenced by the fact I was working around HE and IC – oh yes, and ITS reversed – and still managed an epic fail. Literal ‘of Semitic culture’; wordplay HE (male) + BRA (supporter) + IC (in charge) around ITS reversed.
19 UNLOADED – two definitions, one jocular
20 STUDIO – STUD (boss – as on a shield) + I + O
23 STATE DEPARTMENT – STATEMENT about LEAVE
24 CATER – CARTER minus his first R
25 THEORISER – RIOTS HERE*
DOWN
1 ALLOT – sounds like ‘a lot’
2 LAST BUT NOT LEAST – the literal is ‘ultimately still important’, the wordplay an indication that LAST is spelled like LEAST but without the E. I think. But maybe there are hidden depths which I cannot plumb.
3 GROWN-UPS – in case anyone is wondering about the W, it stands for ‘with’; so, W + N (last letter of parson) in GROUPS
4 TEEN – hidden
5 REFRACTORY – I like both the clue and this very Stephen Fryish sort of word; RE + [spanne]R in FACTORY
6 PRONTO – PRO + NOT*
7 QUICK-WITTEDNESS – ‘astuteness’; some won’t like the undifferentiated use of TED for ‘male’ in QUICK (‘once living’, ie old word for living) + WIT[h] (‘mostly with’) + TED + NESS
8 ERGONOMIC – ‘of work efficiency’; GO (‘spirit’) in NO CRIME*
12 IRREVERENT – ‘impious’; IR (‘Irish’) + RENT about EVER, where ‘that’ refers back to the word ‘permanently’ – a device not often seen in crosswords.
13 VIRTUOSIC – ‘showing great skill’; TOURS* + I in VIC (as in the Old Vic Theatre)
15 DICTATOR – CID reversed + TA + TO + R
18 CAREER – double definition. Does the question mark indicate that a career is not a job? Perhaps we should be told.
21 OTTER – ‘fish-eater’ is the – to me – perfectly acceptable literal; from OTT (over the top) + ER
22 WAKE – ‘late vigil’ is a nice description of a wake; a boat produces a wake or wash as long as you remember to start it.
I have admit to thinking the transporter in 24ac was a CRATER!
I made it difficult for myself by pencilling in …..-MINDEDNESS for 7d and totally forgetting the possibility of the once ubiquitous bra in 17a.
PIQUE, PARTAKEN and PRONTO all took a lot of felling.
Good puzzle I thought – interesting words readily accessible through the cryptics.
By the way Ulaca, you have this marked as 25515 which confused me as I have 25802 online. Is there a simple explanation which hasn’t occurred to me…not that it matters very much anyway!
Edited at 2014-06-02 08:11 am (UTC)
I completed all but 17ac in 26 minutes including time wasted considering LAVE at 22 before seeing the correct answer. Unfortunately like the blogger I have to confess to using aids to fill in the three remaining unchecked letters at 17. I’d already spent 5 minutes on them and once I had crossed the 30-minute line I wasn’t prepared to hang around any longer.
‘Shrek with a reindeer instead of a donkey’… you say it like it’s a bad thing…
In 18dn, maybe the ? is because a job is not necessarily a career
I enjoyed this, though made things difficult by writing quick-headedness to start with, ironic or what? Soon realised, when Michael Caine (and not Jude Law) showed me I was wrong..
I am suggesting that a career in that sense is necessarily and unavoidably a job. However a job can be a one-off or unrepeatable event which could not be built into a career.. never mind though!
Edited at 2014-06-02 09:19 am (UTC)
Whatever! (Evs)
Solvers using the iPad app (keriothe?) will notice with horror that the keyboard for the QC has changed to the unpleasant one used for the ST. I hope that this is not a taste of things to come.
Edited at 2014-06-02 08:53 am (UTC)
Nice crossword today – 65 minutes of steady and satisfying solving. I had LAVE too until WAKE suddenly popped into my head…..
18: I’d say a career is a sequence of jobs.
LOI FILM, after being another who was held up by writing MINDEDNESS.
I might have been slightly quicker in the SW but it took me a little while to convince myself that VIRTUOSIC was a word. I don’t exactly use VITUPERATE, HEBRAISTIC and REFRACTORY on a daily basis either.
Terror awaited at 22, actually my LOI, with ?A?E, the alphabet soup strainer’s nightmare. LAVE was the swine of a first thought, obliterating other meanings of wash, but it fell surprisingly quickly for a’ that.
UNLOADED as CoD for the whimsy. Do cryptics like this only work in English?
Definitely Michael Caine for me at 14, so it didn’t take too long to Get Carter in 24.
No doubt there are harder puzzles to come this week but at this level you have to take them one puzzle at a time. Obviously today has given us the confidence to push on and hopefully we’ll do well at the end of the day.
I didn’t know HEBRAISTIC but it was quite straightforward from definition. In a Rumsfeldian vein I’d say VITUPERATE was an unknown known – I didn’t know I knew the word until I needed it here. Or does that make it a known unknown?
Followed up by a workman like puzzle that never really taxed – 20 minute meander.
I may yet go into purdah for the duration of the dreaded world cup.
FOI ALLIGATOR, LOI PARTAKEN. If “Foreign Office” = STATE DEPARTMENT, then are we to expect “Foreign Office” = “Quai d’Orsay” any time in the future? Admittedly, “Foreign Foreign Office” would have made it too easy, but still …
HEBRAISTIC took some working out, but my COD goes to my LOI PARTAKEN – always good when the seemingly insignificant word in the clue is the definition!