This is rather harder than your average Monday, my time of 31:50, however, being inflated by some careless biffing at 1 down.
We have a bit of a weird clue at 20 down, but the biggest talking point is likely to be a couple of even odder clues at 13 across and 4 down, where an obscure term is seeking an even obscurer companion.
| ACROSS | |
| 1 | Problems exist over European exchange programme (7) |
| ERASMUS -reversal of SUMS (problems) ARE (exist); the Erasmus Programme (‘EuRopean Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students’) is an EU student exchange programme established in 1987 | |
| 5 | One holding a person’s hat by peak (6) |
| CAPTOR – CAP (hat) TOR (peak) | |
| 8 | Is girl able to take out competitor? (9) |
| CANDIDATE – CAN DI DATE (a fellow?); DATE = take out | |
| 9 | Complain doctor’s consuming alcohol (5) |
| GRUMP – RUM in GP; GRUMP can be a verb as well as a noun | |
| 11 | Fraud succeeded with one pair of unknowns (5) |
| SWIZZ – S (succeeded) W (with) 1 (one) ZZ (two mathematical unknowns) | |
| 12 | A large youth taking pint round for singer (9) |
| BALLADEER – A L LAD in BEER | |
| 13 | Your associate has perhaps initially put back bract (8) |
| PHYLLARY – reversal (put back) of YR (your) ALLY H[as] P[erhaps]; a bract (and thus a phyllary too) is ‘a specialized leaf, usually smaller than the foliage leaves, with a single flower or inflorescence growing in its axil’; all clear then… | |
| 15 | What to get after nine assembly toys for young one? (6) |
| KITTEN – I think the idea is that if you’ve already worked on nine, let’s say, Meccano kits, AKA ‘assembly toys’, then the next one will be ‘kit ten’; like all jokes, it loses a bit when you have to explain it. Unless, I suppose, it wasn’t very funny in the first place… | |
| 17 | Dilapidated horse-drawn carriage carrying two bishops (6) |
| SHABBY – BB in SHAY | |
| 19 | Crustacean caught with light line by angler, perhaps (8) |
| CRAYFISH – C (caught) RAY (light line) FISH (angler, perhaps); the angler, or anglerfish, or angler fish, lives at the bottom of the sea pondering issues such as why it has been given not only one confusing and rather dull name, but three of them | |
| 22 | Feature of Berg’s music composed almost in A (9) |
| ATONALISM – anagram* of ALMOST IN A; there are those who prefer Berg to, say, Rossini. I am not numbered among them | |
| 23 | Be anxious having wife in residence (5) |
| SWEAT – W in SEAT; ‘she was sweating over her exam results’ | |
| 24 | Mushroom used in kitchen Okinawa-style (5) |
| ENOKI – hidden; definitely sounds Japanesey enough for one of their mushrooms. I’m in a bit of a 50s/60s Japanese film mode at the moment: the 9-hour epic Human Condition trilogy is rather extraordinary in terms of the scalpel it takes to Japanese barbarism before, during and after WWII. | |
| 25 | Picture accepting a temperature disturbance for the country? (9) |
| PATRIOTIC – A T RIOT in PIC | |
| 26 | Day in NY? Yes, fantastic city (6) |
| SYDNEY -D in NY YES* | |
| 27 | Painter of heavenly figure (7) |
| RAPHAEL – double definition referencing the sublime Italian painter (1483-1520) and the archangel (sharing duties with Michael and Gabriel) | |
| DOWN | |
| 1 | Extra for packet? More than enough soup without seconds (6,7) |
| EXCESS POSTAGE – EXCESS (more than enough) S (seconds) in POTAGE (soup); excess postage is essentially the payment due from the addressee when insufficient stamps have been put on a letter or packet. I put first ‘excess luggage’, then ‘excess baggage’, each of which, unlike ‘excess postage’, has its own entry in Collins. | |
| 2 | Man in suit failing to start Yankee’s guaranteed payment (7) |
| ANNUITY – []AN [i]N [s]UIT Y (Yankee) | |
| 3 | Principal Zulu city (5) |
| MAINZ – MAIN Z; a place nearly always preceded by ‘Frankfurt und’; edit: or not! Actually, I was thinking of Frankfurt am Main, referencing the river on which the city is situated. I will continue not to Google everything (because I think it’s more fun) and occasionally I must pay the price! | |
| 4 | Dingy loos set up in Spitzbergen (8) |
| SVALBARD – reversal of DRAB (dingy) LAVS (loos); two names of a little known Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. | |
| 5 | Look up in native American language (6) |
| CREOLE -reversal of LO in CREE (native American) | |
| 6 | Fighting spirit of dog can upset it over years (9) |
| PUGNACITY -PUG (dog) reversal of CAN IT (from the clue) Y (years) | |
| 7 | Wealthy work fast after university (7) |
| OPULENT – OP U LENT (a period of fasting) | |
| 10 | Mum or dad morally correct raising Henry with qualifications (13) |
| PARENTHETICAL -PARENT (mum or dad) ET[h]ICAL (‘raising Henry’ indicates that the H has to go – just about); of course, the other, more prosaic, parsing, would be that the H in ETHICAL is moved up the target word a couple of spaces… | |
| 14 | One keeping books in balance fled having concealed one (9) |
| LIBRARIAN – LIBRA (balance) I in RAN (fled) | |
| 16 | Key runs under professional test champion (8) |
| PROMOTER – PRO (professional) MOT (test) TE (key) R (runs); ‘I wondered when you were going to notice that, Wilson!’: my third deliberate mistake of the blog is in making TE a key, when it is in fact something we have with with jam and bread. The key is obviously E, in which Mendelssohn famously wrote his Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Okay, okay – I Googled that.) | |
| 18 | Excuse a page on science (7) |
| APOLOGY – A P (page) OLOGY (a slang expression for a scientific or pseudo-scientific pursuit) | |
| 20 | Sloth in tree mostly climbing with another likewise (7) |
| INERTIA -I think this is how this works: IN reversal of TRE[e] (tree mostly climbing) reversal of AI, AKA the pale-throated sloth (‘another’ needs to refer to sloth and ‘likewise’ to climbing); if I’ve got this right, I can’t say I’m this clue’s biggest fan | |
| 21 | Small hint? Absolutely (6) |
| SIMPLY – S (small) IMPLY (hint) | |
| 23 | Be mean with male interrupting dance (5) |
| SKIMP – M in SKIP | |
Hard to see this as a Monday puzzle. I entered RAPHAEL thinking it was a remarkably weak CD referring to the Madonna of the Pinks etc, but expecting it to be far subtler. The bract was beyond me and I’d never heard of PHYLLARY, got from a list. Also nho SVALBARD, which I constructed from wordplay and entered with low confidence. The crossing obscurities made the top L bit very difficult and I even had to use electronic aids for ..C.S. POSTAGE: locust postage? incest postage? jacksy postage (remembering Alex Higgins)? Pretty obvious, really. 55 minutes in all, even with aids.
With a couple of aids I got as far as I could but just couldn’t get/guess PHYLLARY.
Made reasonable progress after FOI, SWIZZ, but got held up by last 3 in, ERASMUS, SVALBARD and PHYLLARY. I eventually managed to construct all 3 from wordplay, but only ERASMUS was familiar. I discarded SNACBARD fortunately. 22:14. Thanks setter and U.
I enjoyed constructing all the unknowns and having the satisfaction of finding they were real words when I googled them.
I enjoyed this a lot, despite it being on the hard side, but still solvable without aids. With a few crossers – the P, Y and L, it became clear how the unknown PHYLLARY should be constructed. The NHO ‘shay’ also was confirmed by crossers – I got the POSTAGE bit long before the EXCESS. I was helped by getting the long 10D surprisingly early on once I’d exhausted the possibilities offered by the straightforward SW corner. Another early entry, however, cost me some wasted time, as I had CADIZ as the city, thinking a ‘cadi’ might be a Arab term for a boss – well, it sounds feasible! However, CANDIDATE sorted that out and quickly led to the rest of that final corner. COD to INERTIA, where I failed to parse the Ai – many thanks for explaining that, Ulaca.
DNF. Well I finished in 17:13 but had two wrong. A careless Promotor and an impressively wrong SLAVBURG. I can’t remember getting every unchecked letter of a word wrong before. A failed attempt to reverse LAVS correctly and then a brilliant rejection of DRAB in favour of GRUB(by) led to the creation of the hitherto unknown duchy of SLAVBURG.
COD: CAPTOR.
I think Inertia is clued brilliantly.
Definitely tougher than the average Monday. After 32 minutes I was left with 4dn and 13ac. After a few more minutes I decided a Spitzbergen wasn’t a scabbard (BACS for loos didn’t make sense anyway) so tentatively settled for SVALBARD, but I checked it on the internet before guessing 13 must PHILLARY.
This setter must believe in giving us lesson in Geography and Botany.
Phew!
Much cheating going on here.
Struggled with Excess Postage as thought Pottage had to have TT but T is OK apparantly.
Had Excess Baggage in for ages until I cheated for NHO PHYLLARY.
Didn’t like OLOGY=science.
INERTIA has now moved from MER to COD, forgot the blasted Ai.
Andyf, perhaps you don’t remember this advert for BT
Tough going for a Monday so they gave us a day off to complete it. Same unknowns as most other commenters but put me down as one who enjoyed it.
My personal bias has “fantastic” doing double duty in 26ac. Come on down some time.
Thanks setter and U.
🙂
Defeated at the last by carelessness. I worked out the parsing of 4dn including DRAB, but for some unaccountable reason then put in SVALBRAD. This made 13 ac unsolvable for me as I didn’t check 4dn for accuracy. Enjoyed the rest of it however but a tad disappointed
26’10” for all bar the NHO PHYLLARY and the Norwegian SVALBARD, which I’ve only ever known as Spitzbergen. I wonder why the German name should have survived so long. A note on Apple Maps distinguishes these, with ‘Spitzbergen being the largest and only permanently populated island in the Svalbard archipelago’, which educates me and rather throws the clue into question, doesn’t it? I can’t make a big issue of it anyway, having been bowled twice today.
41 mins including a very deep nap from which I came out not knowing what time of day it was. Finally stuck with SCABBARD which made no sense, and as my time was off the scale anyway, I looked it up. Turns out I knew it perfectly well.
All correct, and a steady solve, although entering CREEOL at first, held me up with BALLADEER. SVALBARD not a problem, as it features in a lot of BBC natural history programs.
PHYLLARY I’ve probably seen in AZED in the sun and distant past.
Thanks for the explanation to INERTIA, as I couldn’t parse that.
Nice bank holiday puzzle.
21:58. Solved late in the day and, if the general assessment of the difficulty is correct, perhaps I should do so more often. The unknowns – in the clues and the answers – proved unproblematic in the end and the whole didn’t feel too far from a typical Monday offering.
It’s funny, I consider my general knowledge to be poor but SVALBARD and the ERASMUS scheme are so well known to me that I thought those clues were easy and surely SVALBARD is one of the best sounding names in the world? ENOKI was new to me but like our blogger I thought it sounded sufficiently Japanese and mushroomy to be confident with it. I failed to parse the “AI” at the end of INERTIA and could only get PHYLLARY from the wordplay -it doesn’t even feature in the ODE but that volume is sadly so over-stuffed with computing terms and other neologisms that it doesn’t have room for much else. I was once charged excess postage for a packet of seeds because two seeds had become aligned in a way that just exceeded the 5mm maximum width and the sorting office had neither the wit nor the generosity to shake the envelope. The excess payment card was posted through the wrong letterbox of a house in the next street. Thanks for the blog.
I was quite please with working out PSYLLARY. ALLY’S as in a contraction of associate has.
Oh well.
When I finished this puzzle (correctly, in just under an hour), I thought: the setter cannot really be serious about this! For me the mark of a good cryptic puzzle (not the Mephisto, not the Listener puzzle, just a normal everyday cryptic crossword puzzle) is entries most people are likely to know, clued so deceptively that most people will be led down the wrong track. It is definitely not a spate of extremely obscure terms clued by “others likewise”, to quote the setter. The terms I did not know but fortunately was able to work out with a lot of luck include SWIZZ, PHYLLARY (and the bract in its definition), ENOKI, SVALBARD, and the ai in INERTIA (although I did vaguely remember having seen that somewhere). It is not the setter’s job to impress the reader with the comprehensiveness of the dictionaries at hand, at least not in this kind of puzzle, and I found it vastly unfair and not at all enjoyable.
On a different note, Frankfurt is often called Frankfurt am Main to distinguish it from another Frankfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, which is not as well known because it is smaller and was once behind the Iron Curtain. MAINZ is of course also named after the Main river, being located on the opposite shore where the Main flows into the Rhine.
22.24 with a certain amount of fingers crossed. Not a puzzle I enjoyed.
Very rarely get to write on here, so I’m taking the opportunity despite the late hour. Finished this in 98:08, which, despite being nowhere near my best, is actually my 9th best time for the 15×15. We’ll gloss over the fact that it seems to be only the ninth time I’ve ever timed myself and finished it, so it’s a PW in a way. Anyway, I’d never heard of the mushroom or PHYLLARY (despite being a biology teacher) or a shay, but it’s always good to learn something. Thanks all.
It’s a shame that if you make a late contribution to the discussion hardly anybody reads it, and if you do so very infrequently then a little disappointing so just to say that I think you did well with that time. For my part I did so badly with it on Monday that I tossed it aside and only came back to it on Wednesday, when I was amazed to complete it, well almost. Unfortunately I put DYSNEY instead of SYDNEY. I know, very annoying to get all the tricky stuff and then do that. Keep up the good work.
I solve on Australian treeware, so am always weeks behind the times/Times. So I do read late posts. Well done.
I thought phyllary was a bit of a swizz. The latter raised a fond Molesworth memory.
No problems with Svalbard as I’ve been there but dnf on Phyllary and Sydney. Good puzzle though.
Well, I too found it a tad unfair, considering the use of (to me) most unheard of words like ERASMUS (the scheme), PHYLLARY (despite doing A-level Biology and knowing bract ) and SVALBARD. So a DNF for me, but all correct despite those clues. Oh and having log-forgotten the use of SWIZZ for fraud (playground usage?). Liked PARENTHETICAL ( because it was easy to deduce!) and ditto with BALLADEER ( my FOI). CAPTOR also deserves a mention, and INERTIA, with the vaguely remembered Ai sloth. Hope for more fun tomorrow.
If I wanted to learn something ide read a book. I enjoy the pleasure of solving something fair and square. You can forget that with this crap if your a mere mortal