42:10
I had to check I was doing the right puzzle to begin with: it’s been that long since 1ac went straight in on a Friday. The clues seemed to get more and more difficult the further down the grid, however, and the SW was the last to fall.
I think I like 26ac best in a strong field. It is very simple in retrospect but I couldn’t see it for ages. Pangram too.
Definitions underlined.
| Across | |
| 1 | Quiet lanes meandering one after another (10) |
| SEQUENTIAL – anagram of QUIET LANES. | |
| 6 | Sons pitch compasses and ruler (4) |
| TSAR – S (sons) which TAR (pitch) surrounds (compasses). | |
| 9 | Refuse to get drawn in by current flap about rich and famous (10) |
| GLITTERATI – LITTER (refuse) contained by (drawn in by) a reversal of (about) I (current) and TAG (flap). | |
| 10 | Heavenly influencer’s famous channel retired (4) |
| ZEUS – SUEZ (canal, famous channel) reversed (retired). | |
| 12 | Penalty scored by Rugby International changed match? You can bet on it (5,7) |
| FRUIT MACHINE – FINE (penalty) containing (scored by) all of RU (rugby) + I (international) + an anagram of (changed) MATCH. | |
| 15 | Slate counter, perhaps with wine beside it (9) |
| DISCREDIT – DISC (counter, perhaps) + RED (wine) + IT. | |
| 17 | Firth and Grant beyond popular (5) |
| INLET – LET (grant) after (beyond) IN (popular). | |
| 18 | Sanctions precluding tons of Hungarian wines (5) |
| OKAYS – tOKAYS (Hungarian wines) minus (precluding) the ‘t’ (tons). I thought of the wine almost immediately having recently completed the WSET Level 2 (yes, I am now qualified to drink wine), but continue to have difficulty with Tokays/Tokaji. I have the same difficulty with Islay/Isla, but these are the only problems with alcohol that I’m prepared to admit. | |
| 19 | Confess and reveal unique diamond in one’s hand? (9) |
| SINGLETON – SING (confess) + LET ON (reveal). A term from the card game Bridge, I guess. | |
| 20 | Head explorer’s meaning to spend time in North Pole base (12) |
| PHRENOLOGIST – GISt (meaning) minus (to spend) ‘t’ (time), contained by (in) an anagram of (base) NORTH POLE. I tried craniologist first. | |
| 24 | Shamelessly look at withdrawing hotel goody bags (4) |
| OGLE – reverse hidden in (withdrawing… bags) hotEL GOody. | |
| 25 | Humour in function hosted by enviable neighbours moving east (10) |
| JOCOSENESS – COS (cosine, function) in (hosted by) JONESES (enviable neighbours) moving the first E (east) left by one. | |
| 26 | Vote against large ironclad contract (4) |
| FLEX – X (vote) next to (against) L (large) in FE (ironclad). | |
| 27 | In general rage, irritated after new drills failed badly (2,3,5) |
| BY AND LARGE – anagram of (irritated) RAGE, after N (new) in (drills) an anagram of (failed) BADLY. | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Cereal’s over by sink (4) |
| SAGO – O (over) by SAG (sink). | |
| 2 | Lacking ecstasy, supply crack (4) |
| QUIP – eQUIP (supply) minus the ‘e’ (ecstasy). | |
| 3 | Bold board perhaps using leverage (12) |
| ENTERPRISING – ENTER (board, perhaps) + PRISING (using leverage). | |
| 4 | Bones of seafarers found on island (5) |
| TARSI – TARS (seafarers) + I (island). | |
| 5 | Person mechanically moving gold and red fruit before noon (9) |
| AUTOMATON – AU (gold) + TOMATO (red fruit) + N (noon). | |
| 7 | Temperature dropped when working clay-pit site in field (10) |
| SPECIALITY – anagram of (when working) CLAY-PIT SITE, minus (dropped) ‘t’ (temperature). | |
| 8 | Muscle’s cramped by lazing about (10) |
| RESPECTING – PEC (muscle) contained (cramped) by RESTING (lazing). | |
| 11 | Failing general hospital shown up after sick beset by pains (8,4) |
| ACHILLES HEEL – LEE (General) + H (hospital) reversed (shown up), after ILL (sick) contained (beset) by ACHES (pains). | |
| 13 | One covering binding request to turn papers over is bound to succeed (5-5) |
| IDIOT-PROOF – I (one) and ROOF (covering), all containing (binding) a reversal of (over) PTO (request to turn) + ID (papers) . | |
| 14 | Dig outside channel topped by earth — an overlay of just one foot (10) |
| ESPADRILLE – SPADE (dig) containing (outside) RILL (channel), after (topped by) E (Earth). | |
| 16 | Rambling Liberal used to lie about rival party member (9) |
| DESULTORY – reversal of (to lie about) L (Liberal) + USED, then TORY (rival party member). | |
| 21 | Raised grievance on the radio (5) |
| GROWN – sounds like (on the radio) “groan” (grievance). | |
| 22 | Swerve erratically to some extent? (4) |
| VEER – hidden in (to some extent) swerVE ERratically. &lit. | |
| 23 | Rum could be what leads to rows in theatre bar area (4) |
| ISLE – aISLE (what leads to rows in theatre) minus (bar) ‘a’ (area). | |
51 minutes. FLEX was my LOI. Several answers were biffed and two of these were never parsed, PHRENOLOGIST and IDIOT PROOF – I’d like to think I’d have got there eventually if I’d been on blogging duty, but I’m not entirely sure of that.
I was pleased not to be caught out by the ZEUS/ SUEZ reversal this time as it has floored me at least twice before. Very enjoyable for a toughie because my progress was steady if a bit slow at times.
Tough day, pleased to subdue this beast over 43 hard-fought minutes. Not quite sure how some of them were solved, but solved they were. Thank you William, especially for explaining what was going on with ESPADRILLE and ISLE which I entered with a shrug.
From The Times They Are A-Changin’:
Come gather round people wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have GROWN
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a-changin’
Another lovely puzzle I thought. As you say, SEQUENTIAL was a write-in. Liked FLEX but didn’t think it meant contract but it must be so. Didn’t know this meaning of SINGLETON. Saw ZEUS luckily from the canal/channel. Didn’t know and NHO JOCOSENESS (I think it’s the second ‘E’ that has to move three places to the left). Liked IDIOT PROOF, BY AND LARGE and PHRENOLOGIST.
Thanks William and setter.
Thanks – you’re right about the ‘E’ that needs moving!
FLEX for contract also caused me pause for thought, as most joints can also extend when some of the associated muscles contract. FLEX doesn’t just refer to the movement of joints, however, as one can ‘flex one’s muscles’; wording that makes little sense to me.
Ah, Yes. I suppose when you flex the muscles you are contracting them. Thanks.
LOI jocoseness – didn’t spot the Joneses but thought it had to be
56 mins all done – enjoyed it a lot as many clues slowly revealed their answers rather than getting stuck on say one or two obscure words.
COD ISLE – liked the surface reading
DNF – not even close – beaten!
I biffed a large number of the solutions, thinking of the word (eg ACHILLES HEEL from the C and I) and then trying to parse it; never did figure out PHRENOLOGIST. FLEX is my COD, among a number of good clues.
Got there eventually – I like pangrams! 😃
51 minutes with LOI ZEUS taking an age. COD to JOCOSENESS even though I wasn’t sure it’s a word. A puzzle which was a bit like assembling IKEA furniture, where you knew all the parts would fit but you couldn’t see how. Thank you William and setter.
A tricky one! SEQUENTIAL and most of its danglers were write ins, but then things got decidedly more awkward. Didn’t know that meaning of SINGLETON and failed to parse PHRENOLOGIST, but beat the thing into submission eventually, with ZEUS LOI. 33:50. Thanks setter and William.
Enjoyed this, despite yet again not noticing the pangram. No unknowns but several clues, quite tough to parse!
53 mins after, like william, starting at a sprint but slowing to a crawl.
I was fooled for ages by the clever misdirection in RESPECTING, PHRENOLOGIST and ISLE. Took a long time to construct JOCOSENESS and as long again to believe it.
Never parsed IDIOT PROOF so thanks for that, it wasn’t.
Excellent puzzle, close to the limits of my ability but all fair and rewarding the effort.
Thanks both.
Like the blogger I was lulled into a false sense of security with SEQUENTIAL and all the down clues off it going in quickly for a beautiful looking grid after less than a minute. But then a shuddering slow down and the clues went in anything but.
SAGO came up in a recent non-times crossword where it was new to me but turns out is actually quite the popular breakfast.
Pieced together IDIOT-PROOF to then wonder if the setter was mocking me.
ESPADRILLE took an age despite a shoe/sock item immediately coming to mind from the clue.
LOI OKAYS. I didn’t know the wine (I tend to stick to the same few types of red). If I had spotted the pangram I think this would have gone in quicker.
Found this hard and had to come back to it but worth it just to get 5/5 for the week with not even a typo.
A few I needed to double check my parsing on, or like PHRENOLOGIST only half parsed. So cheers blogger.
COD: IDIOT-PROOF which this was anything but.
50.33
Not sure whether this was very good or very annoying with so much complicated w/p that meant one was tending to treat sone of the clues like a Concise (here’s looking at you IDIOT PROOF and ESPADRILLE). BY AND LARGE was excellent though and had me kippered all ends up trying to anagram the wrong letters and missing the correct definition. PHRENOLOGIST was a nice clue too.
Thanks William and Setter
23.53, as WJS says, with early clues falling easily but fairly quickly encountering clues where the wordplay was exceptionally (and in some cases bafflingly) dense or complicated. Some I persevered with, ISLE for example prompted by Rum, but requiring some staring to disentangle the rest – in this instance as in others I didn’t trust the entry until I struggled through the wordplay.
I thought my list of Hungarian wines stopped with Egri Bikaver (bulls Blood if you prefer it in English) but Baron Munchausen came to the rescue with his “far superior Tokay from the imperial cellar in Vienna”.
I don’t think I had a particular favourite among the clues – too much like hard work, and glad it wasn’t my turn to blog. Well done, William, and sympathy!
DNF in 31 mins. One error. A lazy QUIT – which didn’t work – for QUIP. Ironically it benefits and preserves my SNITCH.
COD: JOCOSENESS.
Like others, I breezed through the NW then ground to a halt, several times. Didn’t bother to parse a few once crossers in place: IDIOT PROOF, PHRENOLOGIST, JOCOSENESS (spotting the Joneses afterwards).
About 22′, in two chunks due to interruption.
Thanks william and setter.
Thanks william_j_s and setter.
17a Inlet. I biffed Colin having the L check. Doh!
1d Sago. We had this recently or it would have taken forever to recognise that sago is a cereal. I haven’t eaten any sago since primary school, and that was for pudding.
13d Idiot proof biffed. Thanks William.
25a Jocoseness, thought of the Joneses immediately but was fooled by “moving east” to thinking it was sesenoJ which is unpronounceable.
Pangram missed as usual.
42:21 But a pink square for absent-mindedly entering GROAN (groan). Another first-rate puzzle with soem fiendish word-play. SEQUENTIAL was a clever gimme to encourage a false sense of confidence Was unable (or couldn’t be arsed) to parse ACHILLES HEEL, IDIOT PROOF or PHRENOLOGIST.
It’s been a very good week.
Thanks to William and the setter
58 mins.
A toughie – glad to get through it. First saw jocoseness many years ago in Kingsley Amis’s ‘Jake’s Thing’. [Powle refrained from stating what another part of his grounds for asking Jake to do this job might have been, nor did he imply anything of the kind by his manner, which was entirely free from both jocoseness and its conscious avoidance.] Never seen it since, outside of crosswordland.
Thanks, w.
17:36. This one was tough despite an absence of obscurities, aka things I haven’t heard of. I really enjoy this kind of puzzle, and I really enjoyed this one. Some rather convoluted and impenetrable wordplay is I guess an inevitable feature.
SWOL as I had to use aids for a few. One clue I didn’t need them for was OKAYS. There was an amusing film a few years ago called ‘Dean Spanley’ in which tokay was central to the the plot. The film starred Sam Neill as the eponymous dean, Brian Brown, Jeremy Northam and Peter O’Toole in what must have been one of his last films.
Too hard for me. Oddly I got some of the tough ones, eg JOCOSENESS, but was beaten by easier fare – now I see the answers.
Top easy: bottom not so as others have said. I enjoyed it in my slow-coach way. This week has taken me 90 mins in total. Just about a year looking at this site and I am not getting faster notwithstanding all the good advice herein. May thanks though to all setters, blogers and others
Way too tricky for me to finish without cheating but I would’ve thought DESULTORY (it sounds too much like ‘insulting’ to remember the correct meaning) is significantly more obscure than JOCOSENESS. NHO ‘tokay’, I’ve heard of ‘Bull’s blood’ which briefly went in and out of fashion just after the fall of the iron curtain and is apparently popular again but I’ve never actually tried it.
28:51
Was expecting a Friday stinker but surprisingly found most of this very accessible and enjoyable – no unknown words is always a bonus. Only a couple of acrosses in on the first pass, including a punt at PHRENOLOGIST, though couldn’t see much of the parsing initially. After twenty minutes or so, was left with six – JOCOSENESS and ISLE; ESPADRILLE, IDIOT-PROOF and FLEX; and finally ZEUS solved in that order.
Thanks William and setter
16:59
A lot of biffing had me heading for a decent time but I struggled at the end with the unknown JOCOSENESS (like our Bolton correspondent I had all the pieces but couldn’t work out how to assemble them) and the crossing DESULTORY with its no less complex wordplay and a definition that didn’t really help as I had the word mixed up with derisory in my brain.
Some good stuff though.
I always used to get desultory mixed up in exactly the same way until I learned that the root is the Latin ‘salire’, to jump, via ‘desultorius’, to jump from. So it means jumping from one thing to another. That’s helped me remember it ever since.
With 1ac and the associated answers it seemed we were in for a peculiarly easy one. Not so of course, and this excellent crossword soon proved to be challenging, to say the least. But I had no grumbles with any of it, just being a bit doubtful that desultory meant rambling and that spade meant dig, but no doubt the dictionaries justify these. I was unable to find the anagram indicator for PHRENOLOGIST, stupidly thinking that the base was E. 77 minutes.
Two goes needed.
– Just about remembered tokay from previous crosswords to get OKAYS, helped a lot by the checkers
– The checkers also helped me put together JOCOSENESS once I’d thought of the Joneses
– Saw what ‘ironclad’ might be doing early on but still only figured out FLEX once I had the E from ESPADRILLE
Thanks William and setter.
FOI Tarsi
LOI Okays
COD Desultory
DNF and revealed my last two after 60 mins, ESPADRILLE and NHO JOCOSENESS (where I only needed the first letter). Neither resulted in a PDM moment so another 60 mins wouldn’t have helped… Otherwise a good puzzle with a mix of straightforward and not-so-straightforward clues. Thanks William and setter.
I didn’t get off to a good start by putting in oats for 1 down, which does nearly parse, but I saw sequential almost immediately and erased it. The answers did come slowly, and I used bits and pieces of the wordplay to come up with the answers. If something ends in heel, what is it likely to be? Jocoseness was tough, but if you try putting sec and cos at various likely points you may see it. Phrenologist was a pure biff and led to major breakthroughs. I Ninja-turtled tokay/okay via Sherlock Holmes.
Time: 46:06
Yes. Having completed the NW in record time, I had to check if I’d opened the quickie by mistake. However, the rest took me 46 mins, albeit distracted by doing this on a beach in Anglesey. LOI ZEUS, which might have been easier if I’d looked for a pangram.
I do these crosswords as a pastime and a pleasure. But when one like today’s comes along, where I feel lm being battered into submission, I lose the will to live. Too much of a challenge for me. I’d rather be hit over the head with a soggy sausage.
Congrats to William for working it all out. Chapeau!
39 – tough but very rewarding. Some early biffs kept the time lower than it would have been if I had stopped (or needed) to parse.
Played all round this and it nipped through the wide gap between bat and pad and bowled me all ends up.
About three quarters of it done in just over half an hour, then lost the will to continue. No staying power. I can see it all now it has been explained, but not my kind of puzzle.
DNF
Don’t know exactly how long this took me – certainly more than an hour. But I did manage to finish it without aids so quite pleased with myself – particularly because I was trying and failing to assist my partner with the cryptic in another daily which seems to be getting much more difficult following a recent change in crossword editor.
As others have reported a flying start and then a bit of a grind downwards.
As seems to happen more frequently as I age, I know stuff but not quite sure why eg SINGLETON and JOCOSENESS. By contrast, I know exactly why Tokay and PHRENOLOGIST have left their mark on my brain.
Thanks to setter and William.
Late in the day, crawled over the line to finish with the short ones FLEX and ISLE in about 50 minutes while watching tennis. Excellent puzzle, have to admit I didn’t stop to parse IDIOT PROOF or spot the JONESES so thanks william_j_s for the blog.
This was hard but I got there in the end but with one wrong. Early on I put QUIT but wasn’t entirely happy either that quit meant “crack” or “quite” meant “supply”. But I forgot to go back and see QUIP. I loved the Joneses, very clever clue. No problem with SINGLETON since I used to play bridge (family of four). The surface readings in this crossword were brilliant. For example, “Rum could be what leads to rows in theatre bar area”.
56:05
Similar experience to others, of 1a going in easily then soon grinding to a halt.
PHRENOLOGIST my COD.
LOI was RESPECTING.
Thanks William and setter.
1 hour 32m. Good few biffs in there but kept getting something to keep me going. Quite enjoyed this one as tough but fair…I think!
Well done! That’s impressive persistence – hope you felt a sense of achievement at the end.
I don’t have an exact time for this puzzle because I broke off and left the timer running. But I think about 40 minutes. LOI was jocoseness , i got the jones aspect ok but though I know jocose I NHO jocoseness.
I really enjoyed this puzzle a lot, it was challenging without being obscure.
Thanks setter and blogger
45 mins ish. I really enjoyed ISLE = short and sweet but very clever wording.
JOCOSENESS isn’t in my vocabulary (like COGNOMEN earlier in the week), so I failed with that and the more gettable ISLE. Tough one
About 45 mins. Pretty hard I thought but not as diabolic as Thursday which I never came close to finishing.
Sunday evening and 36’53’. Definitely a tough one, but with gentle applied brain pressure each clue eventually fell. Very much liked FLEX. Got the general idea of 9 across early on, but lost time thinking REFUSE was ROT. Many thanks.