Times Crossword 25,403, 20 February 2013

Solving Time: About 15 minutes, a little faster than average for a blogging day. There are one or two tricky clues, but otherwise I don’t think there is much to detain the quicker solver for long. That isn’t a criticism – the crossword was a very respectable effort, and a bit of a relief after some recent ones, including the last one I blogged.
Very unusually for a Times crossword, there are no proper nouns at all, and no reference to cricket either!

cd = cryptic definition, dd = double definition, rev = reversed, anagrams are *(–), homophones indicated in “”

ODO means the Oxford Dictionaries Online

Across
1 mannered – male = M + ANNE + RED
5 captor – officer = CAPT(ain) + OR, other ranks
8 sow – S(H)OW
9 supplicant – current = I + Conservative in to replace = SUPPLANT
10 ideogram – fish = IDE + move = GO rev., + RAM (= Aries)
11 patois – PA + TO + I + S
12 need – captured = NE(TT)ED
14 watertight – not hard to work out why!
17 cross-refer – annoyed = CROSS + spliff = RE(E)FER
20 gall – GALL(OWS)
23 impact – devil = IMP + ACT
24 streamer – queen = R in STEAMER
25 aftershave – *(SAVE FATHER)
26 nun – “NONE”
27 barege – as an illustration = EG in unadorned = BARE. One of the trickier clues simply because barege is an uncommon word. A wool fabric named after a village in the Pyrenees, Bareges, where it was first made. I’ve been there. Like most ski resorts it’s a total dump in the summer, in an otherwise lovely area
28 initiate – I + NIT (= egg) + I ATE
Down
1 messianic – a reference to Olivier Messiaen, ie MESSIA(E)N + IC(E) = reserve
2 nowhere – NOW HERE, in (the middle of) nowhere
3 ensign – hidden, seek & ye shall find..
4 esplanade – *(SEAPLANE + DEPARTS)
5 clipper – dd
6 plaything – story acted on stage = PLAY + *(NIGHT) – a very neat clue
7 ostrich – (M)OST RICH
13 dismantle – *(LENS + ADMIT)
15 eyestrain – looks at = EYES + TRAIN
16 tolerance – *(CLEAR TONE)
18 rum baba – dance = RUMBA + BA = degree
19 retiree – on = RE + TIREE, one of the flatter Hebridean islands.
21 ammonia – bullets = AMMO + Need Introducing Apace
22 defect – a dd, to defect as in Burgess or Maclean, and defect as in fault. A tricky clue, with little help from the crossing letters, and my last one in.

Author: JerryW

I love The Times crosswords..

31 comments on “Times Crossword 25,403, 20 February 2013”

  1. Made heavy weather of this, becoming becalmed on the left hand side. Good to see OSTRICH popping up – if only briefly – after his shorter, three-toed ‘cousin’ refused to emerge from his sandy bed on Monday. COD to RETIREE, if only for its potential as a quarry to be mined by some of our senior members…

    Edited at 2013-02-20 01:18 am (UTC)

    1. As a retiree who keeps going back to work being put out to pasture even somewhere as lovely as the Hebrides isn’t too appealing.
  2. Lots of straightforward clues (e.g., OSTRICH); some a bit harder to wrangle (e.g., MESSIANIC); then ages on the last two: BAREGE and DEFECT. (The possibilities for □E□E□T must be legion.)

    Thought the insertion device in 9ac was good: “following the left”.

    Edited at 2013-02-20 01:52 am (UTC)

  3. After 30 minutes I still had gaps in every quarter but gradually whittled these down to two, 22dn and 27ac, at which stage time simply ran away from me with no further progress being made.

    To confirm mct’s point, Chambers lists 48 possibilities for ?E?E?T as I discovered when I resorted to aids.

    I don’t think I would have solved 27 under any circumstances as I have not heard of BAREGE, nor anything like it, but unfortunately I never even got a shot at it as I had carelessly written DISMANTEL at 13dn so I was looking for a fabric to fit ?A?L?E. Having already given up the ghost I selected FAILLE from Chambers list of options, which fits the definition perfectly but left me floundering for the remaining wordplay.

    Not my finest effort on a pretty easy puzzle.

    Edited at 2013-02-20 02:20 am (UTC)

  4. LOI was 22d; and I think I ran through about 35 of the 48 possibilities Jackkt mentions; starting with RE-, having been suckered by ‘Go over’. DNK BAREGE; did anyone? Lots of nicely misleading surfaces: 6d (note, what’s come up here a couple of times, the legitimate capitalization of Story), 16d, 14ac. COD to 20ac, which I only understood post hoc. Jerry, you’ve got Messiaen misspelled, although the link works nonetheless.
  5. 11m, tipped over the ten-minute mark by the unknown BAREGE and DEFECT: the kind of clue that could easily have taken me another five minutes on its own.
    Straightforward but enjoyable, and as Jerry says a bit of a relief after some recent stinkers.
  6. 28.34 for three sub 30s in a row to equal my best run! I managed the unknown at 27a much quicker than plumping for DEFECT having Desert and Repeat as possibles. Thanks for blog as I struggled to see how 7d worked with the head burying doing double duty – would a closing question mark have made it less or more obvious? Or simply inappropriate? Also forgot to lift and separate Aries and sign in 10a, my LOI.
  7. All but one again today, and that one was DEFECT. But I did manage BAREGE (from wordplay, of course. I’d not come across it either).

    Others went in more by luck than judgement, so thanks Jerry for unravelling the wp for MESSIANIC, OSTRICH, SUPPLICANT and others. Also I didn’t see the anagram for DISMANTLE, but it had to be that.

  8. Whizzed through in 21 minutes, used crosswordsolver.org to find the unknown barege, then LOI was 22d _E_E T, put in repent too fast…. now I can repent at leisure. Annoying, because repent works but defect is a much better answer.
  9. No particular problems with this one, just meandered along from top to bottom. Have met BAREGE before so no difficulty there.
  10. Under 19 minutes but with repent for 22, for which I think a fair case can be made though (as with skunk/skank to some) the setter’s choice is certainly better. (As I see a wise owl says above.) Didn’t know barege. Liked 20.

    Edited at 2013-02-20 11:13 am (UTC)

  11. Stared at this for a while before dredging it up from my old dressmaking days (there was nothing else to do on wet weekends at boarding school). I also had REPENT briefly but had just finished The Secret Life of Bletchley Park where Kim Philby et al float about the pages. 18 minutes.
  12. Probably spent nearly as long thinking about multiple possibles as on rest of puzzle (BAREGE, though unfamiliar, came without too much difficulty from wordplay.)
    Eventually decided to save and do something else, and when I came back to have another look, DEFECT went in almost immediately!
  13. 18 minutes after a fast start, held up principally where everyone else was, with DEFECT and BAREGE. PLAYTHING and TOLERANCE my personal picks for the day for the dramatic deception in both.
    DEFECT was a very fine clue if you spotted it, but open to semi-convincing alternatives which you might accept if they were the first you thought of. There have certainly been times when I have considered such clues rather unfair, but only when I have the “wrong” answer, of course.
  14. Thanks for sending me to the Bonxie effort, which is, well, certainly not a Times puzzle. But as a reference work for islands, surely nonpareil.

    COD RE/ TIREE, in a somewhat less than sparkly puzzle perhaps, though on the other hand it is a relief after Mon and Tue!

    Is it necessarily true that the harder puzzles, by reason of longer thought-process on the part of their compilers, produce the highest ratio of pearler-to-plodder?

    Who knows.

    Chris.

  15. About 20 minutes including having to check that 27a really was what the wordplay said it was.
  16. About 20 minutes here too, getting BAREGE from wordplay (and then checking to see if it existed), but I’m another who went with REPENT. Too many choices there. Regards to all.
  17. I’m another who didn’t know BAREGE. Thanks to Georgette Heyer I’m usually good on fabrics but she seems to have missed out on this one. I saw the form of the cryptic quite early on but tried to include IE rather than EG as the “illustration”. I wondered whether BAIERE could possibly be a word. BAREGE ended up as my LOI. Enjoyable. 25 minutes. Ann
  18. 9:53 for me, held up for a minute or two at the end by DEFECT, -E-E- being my least favourite start to any answer (apart from SEVER :-). No problem with BAREGE though.
  19. Didn’t get to time it, snuck in furtive glances during breaks – MESSIANIC from definition and BAREGE from wordplay. Like most others it seems DEFECT is the last one in.

    Good day for crosswords today – some nice stuff (as always) from Dac in the Independent and a better-than-usual Philistine in the Guardian.

  20. I got BAREGE purely from the wordplay, but on Google Books the catalogue for the Great Exhibition seems to contain at least a dozen items made from it so maybe it’s fallen out of favour over the last ~160 years. _E_E_T gave me a sinking feeling until DEFECT popped up at the last minute to take the place of what would otherwise have been REPENT.
  21. I’m not getting the “buttons repeatedly” part of the clue. Does “buttons” have some special crosswordland meaning or does this simply mean the repeated letters in “buttons” (which seems too elliptical)?
    TIA
      1. Well, that does make sense! Typos in the NY Post version can really make things difficult.
  22. For 9across, could someone explain to me where the last part of the clue “following the left” comes into play.
    1. It is an instruction about where to place the I and C.. following the L (= left)

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