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. | |
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
peru in a Portuguese supermarket meat section….translate app only offered Peru. A helpful fellow shopper advised it was from big big red head chicken.
It is turkey meat.
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.