There was a bit of tricky vocab and GK in here, but once you’d got a crossing letter or two it was eminently biffable for the average, reasonably experienced solver. As times on the Crossword Club site are suggesting.
So, for me, at any rate, not the most satisfying puzzle, but technically I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with it.
17:41
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Plant’s men rebuked in the past (6) |
| ORCHID – OR CHID (past tense of chide) | |
| 4 | The author’s explosive books coming very soon (8) |
| IMMINENT – I’M MINE NT | |
| 10 | Sycophant judge turned to grab near the end (9) |
| FLATTERER – LATTER in REF reversed | |
| 11 | Fish edging towards reptile in Everglades (5) |
| GATOR – TO (towards) in GAR | |
| 12 | Rumours about informer briefly meeting senior officer (7) |
| CANARDS – CA (about) NAR |
|
| 13 | So far ahead, pull on clogs (2,2,3) |
| UP TO NOW – UP (ahead) ON in TOW (ON clogs [up] TOW) | |
| 14 | More competent Republican on board? Not initially (5) |
| ABLER – tABLE R | |
| 15 | Narrowly avoided collision — one arm is shaking, somewhat (4,4) |
| NEAR MISS – hidden | |
| 18 | Prime minister, primarily Tory one who loathes cuddling children (8) |
| THATCHER – T CH in HATER | |
| 20 | Accountant defending economic forecaster in emergency committee (5) |
| COBRA – OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility – hadn’t heard of it either) in CA; COBRA (also unknown to me) is an acronym from Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. Apparently, it leads the UK’s response to crises. | |
| 23 | Reduce intoxication: live right, stopping liquid lunch? (5,2) |
| SOBER UP – BE R in SOUP | |
| 25 | Briefly leave her fermenting port (2,5) |
| LE HAVRE – anagram* of LEAVE HE |
|
| 26 | Key person agreeing to remove idiot (5) |
| ENTER – |
|
| 27 | Notice you left case with no end of enthusiastic praise (9) |
| ADULATION – AD U L A |
|
| 28 | Impatient panel tut vigorously (8) |
| PETULANT – PANEL TUT* ; the sense required is in Collins: ‘irritable, impatient, or sullen in a peevish or capricious way’ | |
| 29 | My inflexible garment (6) |
| CORSET – COR SET | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Authorised agents left behind inoperative insurgents at first (8) |
| OFFICIAL – OFF I~ CIA L | |
| 2 | One leaves revolutionary Russian leader after tea in bed (7) |
| CHANNEL – CHA LEN |
|
| 3 | Understand trainee contracted by sandwich shop (9) |
| INTERPRET – INTER |
|
| 5 | Emperor wrongly claims usurer steals gold (6,8) |
| MARCUS AURELIUS – AU in CLAIMS USURER; he of the famous equestrian statue on the Capitoline Hill, which survived because it was thought to depict the Christian convert Constantine the Great | |
| 6 | Bar in New York for locals avoided by poor actor (5) |
| INGOT – IN GOT |
|
| 7 | Former temporary accommodation areas (7) |
| EXTENTS – EX TENTS | |
| 8 | Hurled professor’s chair (6) |
| THROWN – sounds like throne | |
| 9 | Can clergyman definitely not put up bloke in flat? (6,8) |
| PRISON CHAPLAIN – NO SIR reversed in CHAP in PLAIN | |
| 16 | I act macho, stirring coffee (9) |
| MACCHIATO – I ACT MACHO* | |
| 17 | Artist sent Marx crazy (3,5) |
| MAX ERNST – SENT MARX* for the surrealist and Dadaist artist | |
| 19 | Husband rather against emptying out home, naturally (7) |
| HABITAT – H A BIT A~T | |
| 21 | Boozy sessions with outspoken groups of girls (7) |
| BEVVIES – sounds like bevies | |
| 22 | Extremely polite Disney princess raised like princess in fairytale (6) |
| ASLEEP – reversal of P~E ELSA; my favorite and last in | |
| 24 | Country’s two rivers (5) |
| RURAL – R URAL; sometimes the possessive marking is important | |
15 minutes or so. No real hold-ups, though I didn’t fully parse PRISON CHAPLAIN and needed all the checkers before I got anywhere near working out CANARDS.
FOI Up to now
LOI Canards
COD Prison chaplain
20:08. Enjoyably wide ranging, Ancient Rome to Disney. I liked it.
The NW blocked a sub-20 with brief doubts over CHANNEL=Bed, CANARD=Rumour rather than Lie/Myth and ABLER=a word. I suppose DS is senior to a DC.
COD to “Can clergyman” as a definition.
Thanks to Ulaca and setter. Where is everyone today?
The blog didn’t launch automatically, so I had to push it into the surf myself.
19:16 (with one genuine typo) but felt it could have been quicker. A lot of the clues needed a slower reading but were relatively straight forward once they clicked.
INGOT gave me the most trouble with a lot of time wasted trying to think of an American word for the drinking kind of bar or a word for locals with ‘ham’ in it.
Liked ASLEEP and THATCHER.
Always hate to disagree with the blogger but I quite enjoyed this. Some neat clues and a wide spectrum of difficulty which I think is ideal for a Monday.
Thanks ulaca and setter.
Disagree away. I was probably just being grumpy.
You weren’t. I agree with you as my later post will show.
9:26. I found most of this easy but got badly stuck in the NW corner. Not sure why, the clues all seem perfectly simple now. But then they always seem a bit easier once you know the answer!
8’33”, all parsed except for MARCUS AURELIUS, a write-in with crossers, and LOI INGOT.
Not so CANARD today (ref Only Fools and Horses).
Thanks ulaca and setter.
Yes, not hard, but quite fun I thought.
The OBR has catapulted itself into the public mind by upstaging the Chancellor’s budget recently..
The only Elsa I know was a lioness.
I wondered if the senior officer was Admiral Canaris. But it wasn’t. I wouldn’t regard a DS as senior, meself.
10:54. Stuck at the end with an alphabet trawl to find CANARDS. Otherwise gentle enough for a Monday. Thanks U and setter.
14.36, intrigued by what you (sort of) needed to know for completion: OBR and COBRA, MAX ERST and who’s in Frozen. That and two Cs in the coffee and two Vs in the booze. But no real issues and a pleasant enough Monday.
29 minutes with the last 14 spent on the NW segment which proved reluctant togive up its secrets.
MER at EXTENTS which according to ODE and Collins only exists in the singular (as I suspected) but there’s probably a situation in which the plural might be justified.
A quick google reveals that the term ‘highway extent’, which is the area of land around a road which the local authority maintains, is often used in the plural. A ‘highway extents search’ is a thing, for instance.
It lets the setter off the hook but did anyone here actually know that?
*raises hand* – yep pretty common in the world of property. Could also be the extents of someone’s knowledge.
Well, this was interesting. I was too zonked last night to wonder much about it.
In bell-ringing EXTENT refers to the number of changes in a method ; and, to the number of times a bell or bells can occupy a position without repetition of the changes that gave the bell or bells that position. So ringing three methods would involve three EXTENTS. I suppose bell-ringing is intense, though perhaps not in tents, unless it’s camp analogy.
38 minutes with LOI CANARDS. Not quick by the standards set here but for me a welcome return to form after the confusion of illness. COD to ASLEEP. Thank you U and setter.
32 minutes. General Monday slowness with the crossing CANARDS and INTERPRET being last to yield. I had come across COBRA before in another crossword somewhere and RURAL was another one that rang a crossword bell. I too liked the previously unseen ‘Extremely polite Disney princess’.
Enjoyed this although ultimately defeated by BEVVIES because I didn’t know “bevies”. Thanks for the blog.
Pretty quick for me in about 18′. Stumbled for a few minutes on the emperor after I bunged in Caesar, then couldn’t work out the remainder of the anagram, at least until the PDM. With 4 granddaughters ELSA is known to me only too well!
I enjoyed “Can Clergyman”.
Thanks Ulaca and setter.
My thanks to ulaca and setter.
Some biffing, some sniffing.
12a LOI Canards, is canard=rumour? More of a tale, esp untrue or misleading IMHO.
13a Up to now sounds a bit green paintish but it has come up before and is in Wiktionary.
23a COD Sober up, I like a liquid lunch.
6d Ingot. I was a bit surprised we had to jump from NY to Gotham, but fair enough.
8d Thrown. I initially went for Throne, and was also surprised by “professor” to indicate homonym.
9d P Chaplain biffed.
16d NHO Macchiato, but not much doubt about where to put the 4 unches. I NHO last time as well.
22d Asleep, NHO Princess Elsa, nor the snow queen AFAIK. Had vaguely HO Frozen.
29 minutes for me (anything under 30 mins is fast for me). I was a bit worried about COBRA because like our blogger I neither knew OBR nor COBRA (in the required sense) but it seemed likely. LOI was ASLEEP since I am not current on Disney princesses since my kids are grown up but I have vaguely heard of ELSA as a princess not a lioness (is she in Frozen?). I am another person that enjoyed this.
As said above, enjoyable and not difficult, maybe a little more so than usual for a Monday. 16 minutes. Familiar with OBR and COBRA and happy with CANARD as in the excellent French Private Eye style mag “Le Canard Enchainé”. Familiar with ELSA from grandchildren when they were younger. LOI was MAX ERNST once I clocked he was 3,5 not an 8 letter artist.
13.18
Liked it. NW last in for me as well. MARCUS AURELIUS was a rather good anagram.
Thanks Ulaca/setter.
The COBRA acronym is from “Cabinet Office Briefing Room A” which is where the emergency committee meets (usually)
Ah, so not plus A. Funny how you read these things.
I don’t think of DS Lewis as a senior officer – Chief Inspector Morse would fit the bill.
I thought that too.
Isn’t Detective Superintendent also DS, too?
That’s usually DSU in my experience, presumably to distinguish from Detective Sergeant.
22:11
I liked this. Reasonably straightforward with the odd little twis tto make it interesting. The INGOT/GATOR intersection took a bit of thought as did CHANNEL/CANARDS. Bed for CHANNEL was new to me. I once had to write an essay on Max Ernst’s “The Elephant Celibes” – not easy.
Thanks to Ulaca and the setter
Why is a ‘channel’ a ‘bed’?
A river bed can be referred to as a channel.
You can dig a channel to lay a cable in.
Mostly easy, never parsed PRISON CHAPLAIN or FLATTERER. Top left seemed to be from a different puzzle!
13:47
21:42
These days a Snitch of 70 sets my target at 20 minutes, so missed by a little bit. Made my way around the grid at a reasonable pace, until getting back to the NW where for some time, I had only ORCHID. Realising that the first word of 9d was PRISON gave a little more, but ABLER was the key here, giving the three remaining downs (though I did look suspiciously at CHANNEL) before FLATTERER and LOI CANARDS went in.
Thanks U and setter
Apart from FOI, ALBER, I couldn’t see any other answers in the NW. Had more success in the SW starting with THATCHER. No problem with COBRA. Biffed ASLEEP and MARCUS AURELIUS. The CIA eventually got me going in the NW, and 18 across reminded me of CHID, or was that FRIT? CHANNEL took a moment and CANARDS was LOI. A DS isn’t really very senior though! 18:40. Thanks setter and U.
29 minutes, no problems apart from the usual type. I biffed my last two answers (THROWN and GATOR), having all the checkers and being pretty sure the answers were correct and parsing them afterwards.
Well done! For once I beat your time, with 21 minutes, but……….. I was surprised no-one else seems to have heard of the famous (at least round here) type of chair known as a “threwp”!
18:50 – biffed rather than solved, on the whole, but I’ll take the win, as they say. I suppose rumours does just about work as a definition of CANARDS but the essential element of falsehood is missing. No real complaint.
I didn’t much care for this puzzle. NHO the princess, only vaguely knew the artist, thought that pluralising EXTENT was poor form, and biffed COBRA without considering the economic forecaster.
Then I got held up in the NW corner, not helped by having “officers” at 1D. I can’t blame the setter for that though. I eventually biffed CANARDS, entered CHANNEL with a shrug (didn’t like “bed” as a definition – perhaps got out of the wrong side of mine this morning), and ABLER showed me where I’d blundered.
FOI ORCHID
LOI OFFICIAL
COD THATCHER
TIME 10:36
Didn’t get anything in the NW to start with, but didn’t hang around and worked my way clockwise from the NE in 13:01. Agree with Ulaca that with a few checkers and enumeration a lot of this was a bit too biffable.
Enjoyed this and hardly biffed any of them because the word play was very fair – but I gave up on CANARDS because (a) from the wordplay I was trying to come up with something containing ‘RA’ (informer as ‘rat’ as it so often is), could think of nothing better than ‘contras’, but didn’t write that in because it was obviously not correct, and (b) because I was unaware that canard can mean rumour, so I was never going to biff it – but, having checked, I don’t dispute for a moment that it can.
Surprised myself with a 22 minute clean sheet.
Not happy about CANARDS as DS did not seem adequately superior, nor CHANNEL for bed but could see no alternatives.
LOI CANARDS. COD INGOT.
Thanks to setter and ulaca.
Contrary to one or two who think otherwise, I thought this was a good puzzle which didn’t require too much in the way of obscure GK. I finished in a quickish time for me of 27.46, with only one error on the way where I inserted THRONE for 8dn. If there’s a choice to be made as to how the answer to the clue should be viewed, I invariably choose the wrong option. Easily rectified once UP TO NOW was solved of course.
16:13. On-trend with LOI CANARDS. Bit of a weird word being either an auxiliary wing of an aircraft or a false rumour. From the French for duck, but I can’t see the connection immediately. Quite an inventive selection of vocab required. And I loved the ‘can clergyman’!
Being a relatively inexperienced and decidedly below-average solver, I surprised myself by managing the right-hand side without too many problems. It turned out that all of the right’s problems had migrated to the top-left to lie in wait for me. After a fair amount of biffing I got there in the end at 45:37, though with a handful unparsed.
Thank you for the blog!
17:07
COD: Prison Chaplain
Thanks to ulaca and our setter
I got into trouble by biffing Caesar Augustus, which does have most of the anagram letters, and never having heard of macchiato. Fortunately, I was in the Gotham City Audio Club, so at least I understood ingot. Extents were a technical term in IT, back in the day; if the space in the data base was getting tight, you added another extent.
Time: 27:00
38 mins with a quick start and a number of write-ins that have all been mentioned. Last two in, CHANNEL & CANARDS held me up a bit though I have no idea why! No stand out clues for me today.
Thanks U and setter.
No time as usual but quite a quick and enjoyable solve.
I thought senior officer was a stretch for a DS at 12a.
Glad to find out what COBRA stands for at 20a (thanks U).
I realised it was (ASS)ENTER at 26a but how does KEY = ENTER?
You can use a key to enter but to enter data on a keypad you’d have to use key-in?
BED for CHANNEL at 2d was also a bit of a stretch although beds do form in channels in sandstones for example.
Thanks to setter and Ulaca for the blog.
I read it as ENTER being one of the keys on a keyboard.
Yes, thanks Chris – of course it is. It was staring me in the face as I typed my comment.
I sometimes wonder how I can ALT or at least CTRL the decline in my mental Fn.
Instead of noting such mental failures, instead celebrate getting something right. It is called positive reinforcement, and works well..
A pleasant puzzle, all done over a lunchtime pinta in 23 minutes. From my initial trawl I thought it was going to be difficult, but it turned out to be manageable once I got into the groove, especially as the long clues at 5dn and 9dn yielded fairly quickly. A couple of MERs over THROWN – is professor supposed to be a homophone indicator? – and INTERPRET = understand. For me understanding is a prerequisite to interpretation rather than a synonym for it. But no doubt there are reputable dictionaries which will support our setter.
And I agree with others that calling a DS a senior officer looks like grade inflation, just as in some countries all university teachers are called professors. Was there confusion with Superintendent (DSU)? But no major issues.
FOI – ABLER
LOI – ENTER
COD – THATCHER – The clue seemed an admirable summary.
Thanks to ulaca and other contributors.
I had some time for this over lunch and it did not hold me up too long; by that I mean 30-45 minutes.
LOI ENTER.
I liked the puzzle . DNK ELSA but guessable.
COD to COBRA.
David
I used to think I was good at spelling but I blotted my copybook today with PETULeNT. And I was on the wrong track with CANARDS but arrived at the right answer by losing the last letter of canary (an informer) before adding the DS. I liked the PRISON CHAPLAIN
MER at bevvies being boozy sessions. A bevvy is a drink and more than one is not necessarily a boozy session and certainly not more than one boozy session
Collins defines bevvy as both a drink and ‘a session of drinking’. Similarly Chambers has ‘a drinking session’.
That brings to mind how the very Scottish Rab C Nesbitt’s favourite word was ‘swally’ – a Scots term for ‘swallow’, ‘a swallow/gulp’, ‘an alcoholic(at least in his case) drink’ and ‘a drinking session’
Nice and easy today, though I was held up by putting ‘Mocchiata’ instead of ‘macchiato’, making CORSET difficult. FOI FLATTERER and LOI CANARDS for a 17:45 time COD PRISON CHAPLAIN with an honorable(?) mention to THATCHER.
29:18
Biffed my LOI, CANARDS, but utterly unable to parse it.
Half my time was spent in the NW corner.
Thanks Ulaca and setter
21 minutes. Quite fun, especially PRISON CHAPLAIN. Assume “professor” meant “someone professing” – in other words, “sounds like” throne.
Nice to see MARCUS AURELIUS, a very smart man, here.
I dig MAX ERNST too.
COBRA I knew, and from this place too.
My LOI was CANARD, which only shows that I was very sleepy.
I know the names of all the coffees but couldn’t begin to say what they are. Quiz: Who played in a band called Ugly Rumours? Answer: Tony Blair. Follow-up: Where did they get the name from? Answer: The mirror writing on the sleeve of the Grateful Dead’s Mars Hotel album. From an Xmas pub quiz round on ’70s rock which I’m helping organise. 14’20” for me so must be a low Snitch. Thanks.
32 minutes, quite easy and a steady solve until only one clue was left. So I got up to get an apple, enough of a break to dee how the wordplay for CANARDS worked. COD to PRISON CHAPLAIN, no sir indeed!
33 minutes with a good chunk of that spent in the NW but I failed with GATER. It’s a friend’s surname and I typed it without giving it any thought. Thanks ulaca.
13.31 . No real problems though I did almost put Canaris instead of canards. Would have kicked myself if I had.