Times 27349 – Of Hackney Laureates and Minotaur Slayers

Author   ulacaPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
A very enjoyable Monday offering, which helps to exorcise the memory of Friday’s bestial offering (excellent though it was after its own fashion). Lots of nice stuff here. I needed three stabs at 8a, essaying ‘Baring Sea’ and ‘Barent Sea’ (close but no corona), but apart from that everything slipped into place pretty seamlessly, enabling me to break the 24-minute barrier. But will anyone, I wonder, break the 4-minute barrier?

ACROSS

1 Neurotic ignoring cold snaps as usual (7)
ROUTINE – anagram* of NEUROTI[c]
5 Empty carriage destined to take away a joiner (6)
CEMENT – C[arriag]E ME[a]NT
8 Creatures overcoming resistance with each lot of cold water (6,3)
BERING SEA – R in BEINGS EA
9 Kindling catches on (5)
TWIGS – double definition (DD)
11 Uninhibited person, say, on end of pier (5)
RAVER – AVER [pie]R
12 Thankless spy and head of security greeting teacher (9)
MAHARISHI – MA[ta] HARI S[ecurity] HI
13 Representative from state capital holding small article (8)
SALESMAN – S in SALEM AN; capital of Oregon – not a lot of non-Americans know that, and probably quite a few of them too
15 Beam left at home by Lawrence initially (6)
LINTEL – L IN TEL (Thomas Edward Lawrence, AKA Lawrence of Arabia, who receives sympathetic treatment in Hannah Arendt’s magnificent, and ever relevant, book The Origins of Totalitarianism)
17 Posh fur fit for purpose (6)
USABLE – U SABLE
19 Drink that’s exceedingly short, say (8)
VERMOUTH – VER[y] MOUTH (say)
22 Painful sensation of deer crossing English stream (9)
HEARTBURN – E in HART (as in ‘As pants the hart for cooling stream when hunted in the chase’) BURN
23 Get rid of brushwood (5)
SCRUB – DD
24 Long period beginning in November (5)
YEARN – YEAR N[ovember]
25 Spy about right in capital of Asian country (9)
ARGENTINA – R in AGENT IN A[sia]
26 Arrest reversed during crisis at surgery (6)
STASIS – reverse hidden
27 University plugging dissertations in ancient Greek (7)
THESEUS – U in THESES for the founder of Athens, though I think he might disown its modern incarnation

DOWN

1 Frightful Tory here? But so is a poet (6,7)
ROBERT SOUTHEY – TORY HERE BUT SO*; Byron ‘dedicated’ his marvellous epic satirical poem Don Juan to this fellow, who had a little too much of the turncoat and the opportunist about him for Byron’s taste. One of his tastier lines in that Dedication calls him ‘A scribbling self-sold soul-hired scorned Iscariot’. Southey did indeed, like his fellow ‘Laker’ Wordsworth, become less radical as he got older, so Frightful Tory serves as a secondary definition.
2 Sort out middle section of tune with composer (7)
UNRAVEL – [t]UN[e] RAVEL
3 Private meal with no starter (5)
INNER – [d]INNER
4 Rogue may tease a mug (4,4)
EASY MEAT – MAY TEASE*
5 Man with no end in sight, repeating certain steps (3-3)
CHA-CHA – CHA[p] twice
6 Religion in Wiltshire regularly occupying various imams (9)
MITHRAISM – [w]I[l]T[s]H[i]R[e] in IMAMS*
7 Place under collar for punch (7)
NAILSET – NAIL (collar as in what the police do with a suspect) followed by SET (place)
10 Tell all lighter Greeks to conserve energy (5,3,5)
SPILL THE BEANS – SPILL (lighter – most recently seen by me being lit by Charlton Heston in Major Dundee – a film which did much to secure the Peckinpah legend as a genius/nutjob before he really had done enough to warrant securing such a legacy) E in THEBANS
14 Adriatic port targets problem with locks (5,4)
SPLIT ENDS – SPLIT (as in Hadjuk) ENDS (as in targets)
16 Conveyed cases almost once a week (8)
SENNIGHT – NIGH in (conveyed by) SENT; ‘once’ here conveying the sense ‘in days gone by’. SENNIGHT is one of those words which, if truth be told, was invented by (on edit: or should that be ‘for’?) crossword compilers. Any more examples?
18 Hard worker supporting architect (7)
ADAMANT – ADAM ANT; Robert Adam was responsible, among other things, for Pulteney Bridge in Bath
20 Universal acclaim for lift (7)
UPRAISE – U PRAISE
21 Fifty per cent of dumb animals making money (6)
DUCATS – DU[mb] CATS
23 Divine smell, for example (5)
SENSE – DD

52 comments on “Times 27349 – Of Hackney Laureates and Minotaur Slayers”

  1. so rather more than 4 minutes, but I’m OK with that. I biffed 10d–was sure the def was ‘Tell all’–but couldn’t grasp the wordplay until after submission, when I finally remembered that ‘spill’. COD to MAHARISHI, for ‘thankless spy’.
  2. At 24 minutes a very pleasant start to the week, although I didn’t actually know the poet at 1dn or NAILSET. The broadcaster, writer and composer, Hubert Gregg, hosted a weekly show on BBC radio for 35 years and always signed off mentioning that he would return “in a sennight”.
  3. About 45 minutes, with interruptions and five minutes to cheat on Wikipedia to find the unknown to me Southey. The other unusual words – Sennight, Nailset – were just inside my memory. After the discussion on Sunday’s puzzle, I was sorry not to see 19a clued as “It’s exceedingly short, say”
  4. ROBERT SOUTHEY at 1dn was no ordinary poet he was Poet Laureate for thirty years and Byron basher. He was for a short time a non-sitting Conservative MP.

    Held up by biffing HEARTACHE at 23ac!

    FOI 9ac TWIGS
    LOI 16dn SENNIGHT
    COD 1dn ROBERT SOUTHEY
    WODs We had 19ac VERMOUTH aplenty yesterday, ‘it’ being the operative word.

    Time a shocking 40+4 mins with grapefruit marmalade, toast
    and the new Marmite peanut butter (crunchy)

    Edited at 2019-05-13 02:30 am (UTC)

    2. I have always thought Southey underrated. His poem The Battle of Blenheim is genuinely passionate. Also, he told the original story of Goldilocks and manages to get the psychology right – Goldilocks is a burgling bag-lady who runs off when the bears arrive and is ‘taken up by the Constable’ and quite right too.
  5. 17:49 … struggled a bit — the wordplay was quite subtle for a Monday morning! — but I did admire a lot of things once they clicked. Like our blogger, I hammered away at variations on Baring/Barent/Barant before finding one that made some sense.

    Nice vignette of the Byron / Southey rivalry, ulaca. Bit like Tupac versus The Notorious B.I.G., then.

    1. I had to look those gentlemen up, and I think perhaps the Scottish flyting tradition of the 15th century suits them better. Both branches of the poetic art seem to have favoured the scatalogical element.
    2. Nice analogy Sotira. Notorious BIG had his funeral at the very up-market and decorous Frank Campbell Chapel on Madison Avenue. My children went to the school the other side of the avenue and the parents had all kinds of trouble making our way past the police lines and through the crowds to pick the kids up that afternoon. The school buses were forced to park blocks away.
  6. All done in a smidge under the half hour. ROBERT SOUTHEY was born only a mile or two from where I’m sitting, but that’s about all I knew about him until Ulaca gave us the low-down. I’ve never managed to get the hang of poetry.

    FOI 3d INNER, LOI and slightly unconvinced by SENNIGHT, but it’s easier to accept now I’ve actually read the clue properly and realised that the definition is “a week”, and not “almost a week”. D’oh.

    DNK the SPILL, the NAILSET or Robert Adam (even though I’ve walked over Pulteney Bridge a few times.)

    1. I cannot make head or tail of a lot of lyric poetry – almost anything by Eliot, Wordsworth’s Prelude, etc – but genuinely enjoy epic narrative poems, for example, Don Juan, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Scott’s Marmion and The Lady in the Lake. Italian epics by Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso (the first two sources for Spenser), based on the Orlando legend, are also great fun, if you like that blend of nostalgia and nonsentimentality.

      Edited at 2019-05-13 08:02 am (UTC)

      1. Thanks for the pointers. I shall make a note to try some of the epic narratives, but given how long my current crossword-inspired reading list is (let alone the rest of my “incoming” shelf) it may be some time before I get there!
  7. I was undone by a biffed BARING SEA. Even with the correct answer in the spelling looks wrong as I was so convinced it was A rather than E. Other than that fairly straightforward except for another biff, putting in CAN CAN initially instead of CHA CHA. Come to think of it isn’t it normally CHA CHA CHA or have I imagined the third CHA?
  8. I also biffed BARING SEA, otherwise a comfortable 32 mins. Not familiar with MITHRAISM nor ROBERT SOUTHEY though with initial R in place, took a punt on ROBERT being the forename.
  9. 7:32. No problems this morning. I knew Southey from having studied Don Juan at university. You’ve got to feel for the man, poet laureate for three decades but now only remembered for being lampooned by Byron.
    1. Actually, I didn’t know he’d been lampooned by Byron; the only thing I remember about him is his ‘After Blenheim’, which I imagine is still anthologized in high school texts and such.
      1. Perhaps, although I don’t think I ever came across him in any other context.
  10. I first came across SENNIGHT in “Caleb’s Crossing” a novel by Geraldine Brooks about the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. She used the word several times from memory.
    With NAILSET, I worked on NAB and NICK before NAIL suggested itself.
    And yes, I did know SALEM was the state capital of Oregon. A Brit, I worked for 20 years for an airline based in McMinnville, OR.

    Edited at 2019-05-13 07:51 am (UTC)

  11. …was a name to conjure with. 24 minutes with LOI SENSE. DNK SENNIGHT but the cryptic was generous .Fortunately, I followed the instructions for the sea. Having already learnt this weekend about a gin and it, VERMOUTH was a write-in. FOI ROBERT SOUTHEY. We went to Dove Cottage last year. It’s well worth a visit if you just happen to be driving through Grasmere on your way to Keswick from Windermere. That’s if the car park isn’t full with new Romantics. I’d biffed SPILL THE BEANS well before working out its component parts. I remember now that SPILLs were what we called tapers in the school labs. COD to SPLIT ENDS. Enjoyable start to the week. Thank you U and setter.
  12. Took far too long to get the first one, but after that it was plain sailing. LOI was SALESMAN for which I could only see SILESIAN whom I assume is a representative of a state, but the cryptic was against it. 19a could have been clued as It? I was a practicer of Transcendental Meditation in the day, but when I discovered that everyone had the same secret mantra, it kind of took the gloss off it.
  13. Good crossword! 1a and 1d went in straight away, so I made a great start. And there was a ‘buy one get one free’ offer on 9a and 23a — so that was quick. I also biffed SPILL THE BEANS and only twigged the taper and Thebans some minutes later. Yes, I liked the thankless spy clue, too, and I liked SENNIGHT (known to me from the Macbeth witches’ “Weary se’nnights, nine times nine, / Shall he dwindle, peak and pine.”) 24 mins.
    Thank you, blogger and setter.
  14. I scooted through the top half of this one but then slowed down, down under. NAILSET, SENNIGHT and MITHRAISM were unknown and constructed from the wordplay. I also reached the BERING SEA via BARING and BARENT. INNER was my FOI, and SALESMAN took me at least 5 minutes at the end, as I failed to separate the article correctly and tried to fit a state capital around SA. I knew Salem as a State capital, but couldn’t have said which State. Until SOUTHEY was conjured up from the rest of the anagrist, I’d tried DELEGATE, but that upset my EASY MEAT. Nice puzzle. 29:24, which should’ve been quicker. Thanks setter and U.
    On edit: I also tried to justify SILESIAN at 13a.

    Edited at 2019-05-13 09:11 am (UTC)

  15. Getting the unknown NAILSET (two words in my Chambers) was handicapped by having TAKES for the kindling clue, which only sort of works by association.
    I share our apparent conviction that there are too many seas that are named after people beginning with B.
    SENNIGHT’s fine in my book (the First Folio, natch), though the Bard had the grace to chuck in either a hyphen or an apostrophe or both.
    MAHARISHI’s presence triggered a long-forgotten memory of the Natural Law Party which contested UK elections in the 90’s. I have a distinct (and verified) memory of a party political broadcast which included a demonstration of yogic flying, basically bouncing around on your bottom in the lotus position. Worth a look to see if you can distinguish it from an otherwise lost Python sketch.
    Oh, 18 minutes or so, for a decent puzzle with some tricky corners.
  16. This wasn’t necessarily difficult, but some of the vocabulary threatened my definition of general knowledge. Pretty sure SENNIGHT was remembered from discussion here, though I don’t recall NAILSET. I have just read the latest of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London novels, in which MITHRAISM regularly features, so that sprang to mind more quickly than it might have done. Nice, and not as easy as some Mondays.

    P.S. Those who have previously been kind enough to affect an interest in my quizzing activities may want to listen to this afternoon’s Brain of Britain (3pm on Radio 4 and all over the internet after that). Following my various close calls in Only Connect, I once more find myself in a tense situation…

    1. Ahh, yes, it was probably Lies Sleeping I dredged him up from, too, though I finished it back in March, so he’s had plenty of time to disappear from the forefront of my consciousness (typical disappearance time for any useful fact: about 3 minutes.)
            1. Certainly was (I have decided I am now supporting Tottenham in the Champions League Final).
  17. What comes from living in the hood, Olivia.

    Seriously, they were fascinating characters, weren’t they — Tupac, especially, with his Black Panther family history and Renaissance Man early years — Shakespeare, ballet, poetry seminars. A formidable talent. Not sure if I find it depressing or epically appropriate that after years of taunting each other about dying in a hail of bullets both did.

    1. Tupac was also something of an SJW. A lot of his stuff was very woke, before people used that word. In talent terms definitely the Byron to Biggie’s Southey.

      Edited at 2019-05-13 02:43 pm (UTC)

      1. If anyone wants an introduction to the work of 2pac, try listening to ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby’. His debut single and dealing with subject matter I don’t think anybody else was touching at the time.

        Martin Hill

        1. Yes I was thinking of that one, among others particularly on that album.
  18. This all seemed to be going swimmingly, but I struggled with a few later clues and in the end made two errors in 10m 22s: NAILSIT (NAILSET was clearly more plausible, although Chambers only seems to have it as two words) & SILESIAN, which I was confident was wrong.

    Some very nice clues today. I think VERMOUTH might be my favourite.

  19. Rather a TLS feel to this. I haven’t looked but I daresay SENNIGHT turns up in Georgette Heyer, not to mention Jane Austen. The panting hart is “heated” in the chase (yes it’s me again Ulaca), though of course it’s also being hunted. That hymn was written by Nahum Tate who was another Poet Laureate. After Friday’s struggle and a TLS brute I still haven’t finished from last week, this was a very refreshing outing. 11.32
    1. That’s okay, Olivia. My wife has left me on my tod while she visits a friend in Vancouver, so I am in need of a little correcting…
    2. And it also comes up in Thomas Hardy I’m pretty sure. When the rustics or whatever they’re referred to as are talking they often use the word.
  20. Like mauefw, silesian 🙁 I knew it was wrong, but couldn’t see the simple answer.
    Sennight occurs here and there in Jane Austen, as Olivia says. It’s also nearly there in Much Ado: ‘Not till Monday, my dear son, which is hence a just seven-night.’ (Leonato)

    Edited at 2019-05-13 11:12 am (UTC)

  21. ….or for ARGENTINA. I thought this was going to be harder than it ultimately turned out to be.

    I couldn’t parse SALESMAN (thanks Ulaca), didn’t know SOUTHEY’s Christian name, had NHO MITHRAISM, and had to trawl the darkest corners of my brain for NAILSET, although I’ve a feeling it’s cropped up in the not-too-distant past. I was very surprised to break 10 minutes.

    FOI CEMENT
    LOI NAILSET
    COD MAHARISHI (also liked SPLIT ENDS)
    TIME 8:41

  22. Pretty straightforward today but slowed down massively in the top half, particularly in the top right. NAILSET was LOI and DNK along with the poet, SENNIGHT and Light=SPILL. I’ve used a nailset for years but would call it a punch. 9a was my COD, reminded me of the ‘What’s brown and sticky?’ joke. If you’re interested in the cult of Mithras there is an old temple opened up and restored in London city.

    Thanks to bloggers and setters.

    No weekend puzzles done this week, no time for such enjoyments!

    Three month challenge: 21/23.

    WS

  23. 20 minutes of pleasure, in very sunny Rutland. No doubt giving us a false impression of the real climate were we to relocate.
    NAILSET from wordplay only. The rest clicked into place, including a poet I had heard of but of course not read. Like the MATA HARI one best. Had to think for a while how SENSE = divine, but then I did see how.
  24. Came here to see if my several guesses were correct. So thanks to the setter for clear instructions as they all were -to my surprise. LOI was NAILSET- I shall look that up in a second;what sort of punch is that? Prior to that MITHRAISM and SENNIGHT both new to me;and SOUTHEY a name which looked OK. COD to SPLIT ENDS.
    I read a lot about the Maharishi last year, it being the 50th anniversary of both The Beatles’ trip to Rishikesh and the white album.Paul remains a supporter of TM apparently.
    David
    PS also had TAKES for Kindling before correction.
  25. 10:09 despite still feeling the effects of a bout of vertigo that laid me low over the weekend so this must have been easyish.

    Mithras was the god who did for me in the 2017 championships so I won’t forget him in a hurry (although the presence of Theseus did have me briefly confusing him with old King Minos).

    Wordplay needed for Southey, nailset dredged up from somewhere and we’ve definitely had sennight in a Times puzzle before.

  26. Not a challenge on par with Friday’s, and I got through fairly easily, say 15 minutes. I had to biff SPILL THE BEANS, due to not knowing of that kind of spill, but all else OK. Regards.
  27. Yes, much easier than Friday’s. Lots of speed-solvers in the 5-7 minutes range, but I would have been surprised to see a sub-4, as there are quite a few things that needed caution in the parsing. I too thought of BARENT and SILESIAN first but you can’t put something in unless you fully understand it, you just can’t!
  28. All over bar the shouting in twenty-six minutes. MITHRAISM and the poet were both new to me, and I suspect SENNIGHT was as well, but I’ve now convinced myself that I’ve known it all along.
  29. 21:35. A few anxious moments as it took a while for me to get my FOI 17ac but slowly built from there into a gentle canter through the rest. Knew the poet at 1dn if not his works. Exercised the same caution as others over the Barent / Baring / Bering sea. Mithraism not the first religion to spring to mind but it was clearly ITHR inside an anagram of IMAMS that was going to end in ISM so that left little room for manoeuvre. The punch at 7dn went in from wordplay. The architect in 18dn was another unknown. A pleasant start to the week.
  30. Thanks setter and ulaca
    Took twice as long as the majority of solvers here, so falling out of the Times level solving skills apparently. Found this very enjoyable but took 4-5 sittings to get it out. Had DURAMS originally at 21d (getting mixed up with the dirham) before finding DUCATS. Didn’t have the trouble with BERING SEA or HEARTBURN though.
    Found a lot of clues that took longer than usual to work out the word play and a couple where the word was new – MITHRAISM and NAILSET. Finished in the NE corner with those two new words and TWIGS the last few in.

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