This is a crossword for Classicists and masochists. I don’t have a time for it, as I had to resort to aids to understand a few of the clues, even if I could guess the answers from wordplay. I didn’t much enjoy it, I have to say. Maybe I’m just rusty after a holiday break from crosswords; I’ll be interested to see what you make of it.
Definitions underlined in bold, (ABC)* indicating anagram of ABC, anagrinds in italics, [deleted letters in square brackets].
| Across | |
| 1 | Trendy city where one avoids a complete soaking (3,4) |
| HIP BATH – trendy = HIP, BATH a city in SW England. | |
| 5 | Drop a trail of blood? (7) |
| DESCENT – I took a while to see how this works. I think it’s a double definition, the second being descent in the sense of bloodline, heredity. | |
| 9 | Allowed knight to leave fast (3) |
| LET – LENT, a Fast, loses N for knight as in chess. | |
| 10 | Return meat sauces firm had marked at the back “with added sweetener” (5-6) |
| SUGAR-COATED – RAGUS (meat sauces) reversed, CO (firm), ATE (had) [marke]D. A bit of a clumsy surface IMO. | |
| 11 | Henry and Norm snatch back chart (3,5) |
| BAR GRAPH – all reversed, H for Henry, PAR for normal, GRAB for snatch. More usually a BAR CHART is a type of graph, but I can live with it. | |
| 12 | Turns round large urban area (6) |
| SPRAWL – All reversed, L[arge], WARPS here meaning turns. I think warps means twists, rather than turns, but I expect Collins allows it. | |
| 15 | Hammer-wielding chap stealing gold from writer (4) |
| THOR – [AU]THOR. There is a God. | |
| 16 | Sole trader following me, horsing around (10) |
| FISHMONGER – F for following, (ME HORSING)*. | |
| 18 | Concerning brewing smooth beer (10) |
| BOTHERSOME – (SMOOTH BEER)*. “Concerning” in the sense of worrying. | |
| 19 | Offshore location one’s going to for broadcast (4) |
| ISLE – sounds like I’LL = one’s going to… | |
| 22 | Young male forward fed a bit of rancid fat (6) |
| LARDON – LAD (young male) ON (forward, as in “move on/move forward”), insert R a bit of rancid. When we use lardons they’re not all fat, they’re little bits of streaky bacon. | |
| 23 | Working on emails — it’s part of the grind (8) |
| SEMOLINA – (ON EMAILS)*. A bit of an odd definition, I think. | |
| 25 | Might a children’s entertainer have had a hand in this? (5,6) |
| GLOVE PUPPET – cryptic definition. | |
| 27 | Little monkey’s spotted leaving river (3) |
| IMP – I’m not sure which river is involved here. The best I can find is the Ure in Yorkshire, which would give us IMPURE to mean spotted, marked, stained. But I haven’t convinced myself. Please find us a better one. | |
| 28 | Port wine drained after soldier pair retired (7) |
| ANTWERP – ANT (soldier) W[in]E, PR reversed. | |
| 29 | Time before new Anglican dramatist (7) |
| TERENCE – T[ime], ERE (before), N[ew], CE (Anglican). Apparently Terence was a Roman dramatist, a.k.a. . I only thought of Terence Rattigan, who wasn’t a Roman; I remember my embarrassing Am-Dram Dad being in The Winslow Boy when I was a kid. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | One taken with the net, perhaps, using computer — one only (7) |
| HALIBUT – HAL (the named of the computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey, a film I have actually seen); I (one) BUT (only). | |
| 2 | Lift, open and restart after repairing (11) |
| PATERNOSTER – (OPEN RESTART)*. | |
| 3 | Ridiculous muscles seen on Murdo when stripped (6) |
| ABSURD – ABS (muscles) [M]URD[O]. | |
| 4 | Cleric from school, nuisance about teaching scripture? (4,6) |
| HIGH PRIEST – High (school), PEST with RI (religious instruction) inside. | |
| 5 | Curse desperate character overcoming resistance (4) |
| DARN – Desperate DAN (who was in the now-defunct Dandy comic) has R for resistance inserted. When did anyone last say darn? Not since my Grandma did, IMO. | |
| 6 | Top professionals turned up carrying Caesar’s first ballista (8) |
| SCORPION – reverse NO I PROS (top professionals) and insert the C from Caesar. Apparently the Scorpio(n) and Ballista were both Roman artillery pieces, but far from being the same thing; I had to learn from the web https://allthedifferences.com › ballista-vs-scorpion | |
| 7 | Skin sizeable amphibian (3) |
| EFT -[h]EFT[y]. | |
| 8 | Little ’un beginning to teethe left in care of stranger (7) |
| TODDLER – T[eethe], L inside ODDER = stranger. | |
| 13 | Venerable Hindu possibly sets aside day devoted to a Christian saint (11) |
| AUGUSTINIAN – AUGUST (venerable), INDIAN (Hindu possibly) loses D for day. | |
| 14 | Caught husband with resin and cannabis in vessel used after dark? (7,3) |
| CHAMBER POT – C[aught], H[usband], AMBER (fossilised resin), POT (cannabis). | |
| 17 | Paraffin smoke rose, nearly chokes (8) |
| KEROSENE – hidden word as above. | |
| 18 | City diary penned by a toff from the south (7) |
| BOLOGNA – LOG (diary) inside A NOB (a toff reversed). | |
| 20 | Model, former partner, somewhat bulky? (7) |
| EXAMPLE – EX (former partner) AMPLE (could mean bulky as in a person of ample size). | |
| 21 | Page, upstanding retro hotel employee (6) |
| PORTER – P[age], RETRO reversed. | |
| 24 | Crack line taken from Dickensian villain (4) |
| QUIP – QUI[L]P. Daniel Quilp was a nasty piece of work in The Old Curiosity Shop. Is this the TLS crossword? | |
| 26 | Choose cape shunned by African Christian (3) |
| OPT – [C]OPT. Copts are an ancient group of Christians in Egypt. | |
36 minutes for this one.
I’d have biffed BAR CHART at 11ac if ‘chart’ hadn’t been in the clue but the wordplay sorted me out. Can’t say I know the expression BAR GRAPH though.
I didn’t know what to make of the wordplay re IMP. The suggestion in the blog is ingenious and sort of works but I really hope the explanation is something other than that.
I liked the definition of FISHMONGER but wondered if ‘Sole trader’ alone might have made a better cryptic clue.
The printing commands for this 15×15 appear to be linked to the crossword in The Times e-paper i.e. exactly how the puzzle looks in the newspaper, squashed to fill only a portion of the page with a heavy black grid. I tried using a different browser (Firefox) and there the print command downloaded the pdf file automatically to my computer which then had to be opened separately in order to print. All the other puzzles seem to be unaffected so I assume this is a glitch rather than a sudden change of policy. I certainly hope so!
I assumed it was a change of policy because it’s so much worse than the status quo ante.
I’m blaming it for my DNF.
Yes, it definitely put me off.
Just spent half an hour online to The Times waiting for someone to complain to about today’s printout problem. Response was: Clear out your cache, change your browser and if it happens again let us know and we’ll send you a questionnaire for you to fill out so we can look into it! My suggestion that he should try the printout from his end was ignored. Not happy!
I posted in the Club forum about this 5 hours ago in the hope that Mick H would see it and get it sorted. So far there’s no reply from him but Linxit (Andy who used to run TfTT after Peter B) has posted this:
Linxit
Looks like they’ve uploaded the wrong file – the URL in the link has exactly the same naming convention as the others. I’ve tried various browsers on Windows and Linux, same result every time.
Thanks Jack. That’s what I assumed. Just a pity that those nice folks at The Times were not even willing to listen. Hopefully, all will be well manana! Norman
Hi, it looks as if the problem affecting the print function on today’s cryptic is a corruption in the file. I’ve asked people who know about such things to see if they can fix it but the good news is that this is not a new design and other puzzles appear to be unaffected.
There seems to be another problem as well. I usually print out an old puzzle 5,000 from the puzzle of the day – ie. number 23,947 today. When I typed in the number in the crossword club and hit return it came up with a completely different number. After several goes I gave up. I blame either the Russians or the Chinese.
I suspect the problem isn’t related, but you’re right it presents a much newer puzzle.
Thanks. The printing problem has been fixed.
We had a paternoster lift where I used to work so first one in for me
I had a funny feeling about this one, and for some reason started with the shortest clues, FOI being THOR. Eventually found my way in and solved it all unaided—though I did then check that SCORPION is listed as synonymous with “ballista” in Collins (« 5. history | a war engine for hurling stones; ballista »). And I couldn’t (can’t!) parse IMP (but Ure guess is certainly as good as mine).
When I think of Terence, I always think of his famous statement (and virtually the only thing I know of his writing), “I’m a human, and nothing human is alien to me.” I’m not sure every (ostensibly) human being could say that… but it’s certainly an asset to a writer of comedies. And a laudatory attitude in general.
21:08
Isn’t there a PLY River? for Plymouth to make sense? Anyway, I took ‘spotted’ to be PIMPLY. [on edit]: An elegant solution, now all we need is the river; I don’t see how the River Plym, which does exist, would work.
Can you explain how the river Plym works, please?
If spotted is pimply then Plym goes around imp and I don’t see where the clue is telling me that. I do not think I have come across a clue where the word to be removed is not all together and is split as Plym is in this case.
Thanks
Re 27 ac: River Plym
As I found out when I tried to find a River Ply.
21:08
I had to look up ‘ballista’, which I’d forgotten; that did me no good, because I didn’t know SCORPION, which the wordplay called for, so I might just as well have skipped the dictionary and assumed that a scorpion is a type of ballista, or vice versa. Biffed FISHMONGER, SUGAR-COATED & AUGUSTINIAN, parsed post-submission. No problem with BAR GRAPH. It didn’t occur to me to stick AU in front of THOR, so I found myself wondering if the setter meant ‘water’ not ‘gold’. Duh.
Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers I must nourish dreams …
(My Descendants, Yeats)
25 mins pre-brekker. I quite liked it, but did think choosing ballista to define scorpion was a bit tricksy. And NHO Copt, nor Terence.
Ta setter and Pip.
17:43, which felt slow as I was held up at the end. Eventually thought of AUGUSTINIAN, which gave me WARPS and let me enter my two probables (IMP and SEMOLINA). I suspect the URE is indeed what we’re looking for, not that it came to me.
I recalled the ballista from Age of Empires – not sure where I dredged SCORPION from though. Knew copt via coptic. TERENCE is new to me, but constructable. The double ‘leave/leaving’ in 9a/27a was a minor shame.
Nice puzzle altogether.
Thanks both.
DNF after 31 minutes as NHO LARDON. Had a feeling it must be something to do with LARD but couldn’t work it out. I don’t think I’d have guessed ON for forward even if I‘d given myself a lot more time.
I also slowed myself down by putting HOT BATH for 1ac and because I also NHO PATERNOSTER for a lift it took me a while to figure out the anagram and realise my mistake.
But I did enjoy this puzzle despite not finishing.
Thanks setter and blogger
PS I just googled lardon, oooohh so that‘s a lardon!!!
I knew while solving that LOPO did not mean ‘spotted’
Glimpsed could mean spotted but unfortunately Glsed doesn’t seem to be a river anywhere.
Nice to get a reminder of TERENCE – my old Latin tutor at university (Peter Brown) was a world expert on him, though I never read any myself.
The late Victorian poet and renowned classicist A. E. Housman used the poet Terence to make an explanatory point. This is the start of the penultimate poem in ‘A Shropshire Lad’:
“Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be too much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.”
With his irony turned up full Housman goes on to berate Terence for being a time-wasting miserable so-and-so. But read on.
I have always liked it anyway.
52 mins with last two in DESCENT & SCORPION holding me up for some time. A number unparsed as above so ta to pip. Quite tricksy I thought with most clues having to be worked out and only a few going straight in.
I liked FISHMONGER.
Thanks pip and setter.
I’m always a day behind on doing the crossword but have a comment on no 28946 and posting here in case anyone reads it ..4down the poet is IMO Michael swan who won an award in 2010 for I wasn’t there..I don’t think anyone else suggested this!
Well maybe, but your Michael Swan isn’t in Wiki unless he’s this one:
“Michael Swan is a writer of English language teaching and reference materials. He graduated from University of Oxford with a bachelor’s degree in modern foreign languages and has later gone for a postgraduate research degree. He is the founder of Swan School of English.”
Hi Clare. There’s an unwritten rule in the Times crossword that living people are never referenced which would rule out Michael Swan.
thank you pootle ..I didn’t know that but it explains why none of the very clever commenters didn’t mention him! you live and learn..
The word literary gives the game away. It is clearly redundant as a description of a poet so we are looking for a literary word for poet and there swan is in the SOED, helpfully tagged “literary” to remove any doubt.
DNF, missing SCORPION and SPRAWL. I dreamed I saw St Augustine but all I could smell was the KEROSENE as I ended up on Desolation Row. There was some good stuff here, particularly HALIBUT and AUGUSTINIAN, and it was a bit too good for me. Thank you Pip and setter.
25:46
I had to move around the grid on this one without ever quite getting a good foothold. The key in the end was finally cracking the anagram for FISHMONGER which helped with SCORPION, AUGUSTINIAN, and then SPRAWL.
There were a couple where I had to rely on wordplay and a couple which weren’t fully parsed until checking the blog and comments, but overall an enjoyable challenge.
Thanks to both.
A curate’s egg for me. Some excellent and fun clues rather spoiled by some very iffy definitions: lardons are not just (or even mainly) fat, an imp is not a small monkey (surely some wordplay around chimp would have made this work better) and the semolina definition is, as our esteemed blogger notes, just odd. But I liked the fishmonger and the trail of blood. Thanks setter and Pip.
‘Imp’ and ‘little monkey’ are synonymous for me in the sense of a naughty child.
About half an hour, ending with LARDON, which I both wasn’t sure about and completely misparsed.
Didn’t know the Quilp character for QUIP; initially put ‘hot bath’ instead of HIP BATH, which held up PATERNOSTER for a while (and even then I wasn’t familiar with its lift meaning); had no idea how IMP worked; didn’t know that TERENCE was a Roman dramatist; hadn’t heard of Hal the computer for HALIBUT; and relied on wordplay to get SCORPION as I didn’t know what a ballista was.
Thanks setter and blogger.
FOI Let
LOI Lardon
COD Fishmonger
To remember HAL do a +1 Caesar shift. (I can’t let you do that, Dave).
I was clearly on the wavelength this morning. Half-knew SCORPION because a ballista acts like one (as opposed to a trebuchet). The Old Curiosity Shop was one of the last Dickens’ books I read. Got IMP straight away, as a naughty child / little monkey as mentioned above, and knowing the URE from ‘O’ level Geography.
SEMOLINA also, part of the grind of primary school food, rivalling tapioca in its ugh-factor. Didn’t parse DESCENT properly.
Noted another appearance of the CHAMBER POT, which went in quickly after yesterday’s controversy.
Urban SPRAWL is a thing now, but I got it from reading William Gibson.
Completed in 16’45”.
Thanks to setter and to pip – hope you feel more positive next time.
56m 53s but beaten by AUGUSTINIAN, for which I had to use aids so SWOLB.
1d was fun: “I can’t let you do that, Dave!”
2d. I’ve come across lifts like that but never that was a term for them.
6d. I had the two ‘O’s but couldn’t make CROSSBOW work. Eventually the pfennig dropped.
Thanks, Pip. I agree with you about LARDONS
Beaten by SCORPION and LARDON, the latter for the reasons noted by others. Didn’t parse IMP, but ‘ure’ sounds like it must be what the setter was aiming at.
DNF
Beaten by DESCENT and EFT after 30’ and have to go to golf, so cannot persevere longer.
Disappointing as I enjoyed what I completed, thanks setter.
20.40, mostly enjoyed, though QUI(L)P took a while to leach out from the pages of Dickens, and DESCENT was smudged, wondering if removing a trail was suggested. I convinced myself there was a River PPLED somewhere in Wales, or possibly a DLED. Or maybe RIMP meant spotted.
Knowing little about the intricacies of Roman artillery, SCORPION went in as if I knew what it was . Interestingly, Piquet’s link to the distinction from a ballista includes the sentence “A ballista is any large crossbow-like siege engine, whereas a scorpion is a small, usually metal, ballista.” Definitive!
No problem with the HAL 9000. Indeed, that clue was good enough for Jehovah!
I felt I must add my two penn’orth because this awful format took most of the enjoyment out of the solve, and also used up more ink than usual. Please fix this for tomorrow – you know who you are!
Crossword pretty straightforward though apart from ‘imp’ which doesn’t seem to work at all, though the answer is obvious.
5a DECENT, thanks for the explanation which is as good as it gets imho.
11a Bar Graph, I too thought Green Paint but both Chart and Graph are in Wiktionary so its OK then. Quite a good clue as “H par grab” is consistent.
15a I thought the author was Henry David Thorau (Theroux), but I can’t spell.
1d HALibut. I enjoyed this despite not having seen 2001. Apparently HAL is IBM (whom we all loved to hate) with a retreat of 1 char in the alphabet per letter.
6d NHO SCORPION; took this machine on trust.
17d misspelt as KerosIne which made glove puppet hard. Can’t even copy out a hidden accurately.
The wiki article on paternoster lifts is worth reading for derivation, history, and list of surviving examples. Sheffield University may have the largest still working (the only one I knew of). None listed in US.
I attended Leicester University complete with a PATERNOSTER
So did I. Classics department, 1977-80.
10 years before me!
There was always the game to see what happens if you stayed in beyond the top floor!
They were banned in the US quite a while ago, but I remember one or two in midwestern cities like Milwaukee.
13:54. I was helped by PATERNOSTER going in early which gave me a foothold in the LHS. I work near Paternoster Square in London and looked up paternoster relatively recently to find what one is. The RHS proved harder to crack, finishing off with ISLE, the clue for which I thought very neat.
Thanks to piquet for explaining IMP, which I biffed and was nowhere near unravelling the cryptic. I’m sure your explanation is correct.
It was in looking up to see whether there really was something called a scorppac (just possible, it seemed, since the ballista was largely unknown) that I saw SCORPION and realised that this was almost certainly the answer, so I entered it without bothering about the ballista. Was almost sure that the setter had made a mistake and that the writer was Thoreau, so like Kevin Gregg wondered where the e had gone. Eventually gave up and used aids for SPRAWL and was very uncomfortable with warps = turns, and for a while couldn’t understand why if you had a hot bath you weren’t getting completely wet. 45 minutes.
22:37 – glad to finish while the clock was still running. I can’t think of a better explanation for IMP than our blogger’s, but I also assumed the Plymouth river was the Ply until post-solve.
About 25 mins
Crossword Club seems to be having an issue so having completed the crossword, I’m now unable to get back in to review, but guessed about 25 mins to complete.
– I assumed the river was URE leaving IMP as the little monkey.
– QUI(L)P recalled from The Old Curiosity Shop – surely one of Dickens’ most tedious books?
– My 95yo father’s name is Terence – no idea the name had a classic connection!
Thanks P and setter
My dad’s middle name was Horace. He used to say if he had to be saddled with an ancient Roman name he would have preferred the more heroic Horatius.
34 minutes. I spent several minutes at the end trying in vain to work out the parsing of IMP, ((L)IMP(OPO) didn’t work) but IMP(URE) seems plausible. NHO SCORPION in the Roman military sense, QUI(L)P was at the outer edges of my literary knowledge and several others like PATERNOSTER and AUGUSTINIAN needed crossers to solve. I liked the surface of HALIBUT.
Enjoyable, though frustrating to have a few unparsed or semi-parsed.
20:38. The Crossword Club version of the puzzle is not working at all, so I did the electronic version in the Puzzle Pages, which gives my time but doesn’t put me on the Leaderboard. Had to spend a lot of time scrolling up and down the page to see the appropriate clues. LET was FOI, then I spotted PATERNOSTER and THOR leading to a smile as HALIBUT went in, remembering 2001SO. My last 5 minutes were spent on 5 clues, 5a, 4d, 12a, 13d and LOI, 19a. SCORPION arrived first although I had no idea what a ballista was. That led to DESCENT and eventually SPRAWL. AUGUSTINIAN was next and ISLE brought up the rear. Didn’t parse IMP, though I’m sure now that URE is the intended river. Thanks setter and Pip.
On edit: Working on Club Site now so have redone it and submitted at 20:38.
24:10
An odd mixture. IMP was biffed and a few were greeted with a shrug rather than a smile -LARDON for example. On the other hand I though HALIBUT, AUGUSTINIAN, PATERNOSTER and QUIP wre excellent Like others I took the author to be Thoreau and didn’t stop to parse it properly.
Thanks to Pip and the setter.
DNF With scorpion unknown, but feel I should have worked this one out.
I enjoyed this one much more than yesterday, with joint COD to descent and fishmonger, the latter because it made me smile.
41 mins slower than average for me.
I am reminded of my favourite, useless translation in a restuarant in Brittany:
Moules et Lardons
Moules with Lardons
22.54 with LOI sugar coated due to first entering it online with two ds. I think that’s why I prefer the paper version. A very fair puzzle with none of the bewildering aspects of yesterday.
Thx setter and blogger.
DNF.
Gave up after 46 minutes, having failed to see QUIP. I was on the non-club version, since I could not get the club version to load, so eventually threw in the towel and revealed the answer. Needed the blog to make sense of it.
I had CROSSBOW for 6d, which greatly delayed getting DESCENT and SPRAWL.
DNF
Held up by an early HOT BATH before I managed PATERNOSTER.and even though I presumed it must be EFT, I didn’t manage DESCENT and SCORPION was beyond me.
Thanks to piquet and the setter
I recently read some commentary on Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul, so like Martin and others when crossbow wouldn’t I was ready with Scorpion. Imp went in on faith that my geography just wasn’t up to snuff, and like Will and Kevin, Thor went in wondering why someone had dropped the E from Thoreau but without much further thought. Thanks Pip, especially for the Imp guess
semolina and grind? I don’t get it.
Semolina is coarsely ground wheat (usually Durum wheat, apparently). So, it can be considered part of the grind. Slightly odd definition, as Piquet writes above.
I quite enjoyed this puzzle, but didn’t finish as I have never heard of the unlikely Quilp. I went with Bump (i.e. bump heads = crack heads) as Blump sounded much more like a Dickensian villain.
Also had no idea what was happening with Imp.
45 minutes with 1 incorrect.
35:13 and all green. Late today. NHO SCORPION as a ballista but I just followed the wordplay and there it was. I took a long while with my last two: QUIP and SPRAWL
Not a masochist but half a classicist. That seems to have been enough because I happily polished this off in 19:07, which given that I very rarely finish Big Puzzle was very exciting. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Couldn’t parse IMP, though (I like the URE theory).
Many thanks PK.
A quickish time on the QC followed by a quickish time of 28.14 on this. Things are looking up! All parsed with the exception of IMP, which didn’t unduly worry me as it couldn’t have been anything else. LOI was LARDON which was carefully constructed, as the answer would never otherwise have come to mind.
Defeated having never heard of QUILP and didn’t think of QUIP (in fact, as is so often the case, I forgot that when you have a checked U then don’t forget to consider Q). Like many others, a MER at LARDON being described as fat. The ones in my freezer are maybe half fat, certainly no more. My thoughts about IMP and the river was that it had something to do with LIMPOPO but I couldn’t make anything work. So DNF since I had to look up Dickensian villains to get QUIP, my LOI. One thing I learned today is just how many letters you can put on -UMP to get a real word.
17’39”. Must have been on wavelength because I saw the B, S and M of 18 ac and said to self BOTHERSOME without even looking at the clue. Couldn’t parse IMP, but am pleased to see no-one else could — with certainty — either. Knew TERENCE from classics days with Tim Mackintosh Smith, Adam Chinn et al. (are you out there?) at Clifton. I too was seeking a writer called THORAU, and bunged it in because what else could it be? Many thanks.
When I still had blank squares at the hour mark I decided to chuck it in and hazard a couple of guesses. Neither of them were right, but the thought of newts did at least occur to me enough to put in EWT at 7d hoping some unknown vocab would save me. I had PUMP in QUIP’s place, and I suspect a Mr Plump wouldn’t look out of place in Dickens’ pages, but how exactly it means ‘crack’ I’m not so sure…
Incidentally, my interpretation of 5a was that to ‘drop a line of blood’ would be to DE-SCENT, hence serving as a semi &lit of sorts, but I think piquet’s suggestion holds more water.
27.35. Not my cup of tea, some of the parsing eluded me, and I think that a number of definitions are decidedly iffy.