Times Cryptic 26858

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
My intermittent run of bad solving times continues with this one on which I spent 90 minutes and failed to complete without resorting to aids although there was only one answer that defeated me. And once again as I compiled the blog I wondered what on earth could have delayed me for so long. I imagine the usual suspects will report sub-10 minute solving times particularly if they’ve had a classical education, but I have to say I found it rather stuffy and dull.

As usual definitions are underlined in bold italics, {deletions are in curly brackets} and [anagrinds, containment, reversal and other indicators in square ones]

Across

1 Caption rewritten to protect leader of Lords Spiritual (8)
PLATONIC – Anagram [rewritten] of CAPTION containing [to protect] L{ords} [leader]. SOED: Of love, a relationship, etc.: of a purely spiritual character, not sexual. With reference to the Greek philospher.
9 Old warrior pilots circling raised ground (8)
ACHILLES – ACES (pilots) containing [circling] HILL (raised ground). Another Greek.
10 Butter in hospital leaving taste less refined (8)
INTRUDER – {h}INT (taste) [hospital leaving], RUDER (less refined)
11 House physician makes chief executive powerless (8)
RESIDENT – {p}RESIDENT (chief executive) [powerless]. Collins advises that in North America, a ‘resident’ is a physician who lives in the hospital where he or she works while undergoing specialist training after completing his or her internship.
12 He wrote line about good companion (10)
LONGFELLOW – L (line), ON (about), G (good), FELLOW (companion). Perhaps most famous as the author of The Song of Hiawatha.
14 Medical man with drill causing misery (4)
MOPE – MO (medical man), PE (drill). I wasn’t familar with this as a noun but it’s in all the usual sources.
15 Heroic lover with piercing sidelong look (7)
LEANDER – AND (with) contained by [piercing] LEER (sidelong look). More Greek mythology.
17 Gag first couple from Lebanon, smuggled in after (7)
SILENCE – LE{banon) [first couple] contained by [smuggled in] SINCE (after)
21 Military alliance in collision at once (4)
NATO – Hidden in {collisio}N AT O{nce}
22 Oily substance from tree put in ground with nitrogen (10)
TURPENTINE – Anagram [ground] of TREE PUT IN and N (nitrogen)
23 Joint ruler and poet wanting start on time (8)
TETRARCH – T (time), {p}ETRARCH (poet) [wanting start]. Roman and Italian stuff now.
25 Charming area within reach across river (8)
ADORABLE – A (area), DO-ABLE (within reach) containing [across] R (river). This was the one for which I resorted to aids. As  90 minutes loomed on the clock I was still missing the answer at 24dn and therefore the second checker, when I became fixated on possibilities such as ‘amenable’ and ‘affable’ and decided it was time to put myself out of my misery by looking up all the options that fitted.
26 Column only remaining in support for bridge (8)
PILASTER – LAST (only remaining) in PIER (support for bridge). Classical architecture now.
27 Cynic — one involved in swindle — means to inherit (8)
DIOGENES – I (one) contained by [involved] DO (swindle), GENES [means to inherit]. Yet more Greek.
Down
2 One’s honour in life less if solitary (8)
LONESOME – ONE’S + OM (honour] in L{if}E [less if]
3 Flavouring rib and leg with salt (8)
TARRAGON – TAR (salt), RAG (rib), ON (leg)
4 English lecturer raised point (4)
NODE – E (English) + DON (lecturer) reversed [raised]
5 Dodgson right in tune with literature initially (7)
CARROLL – R (right) in CAROL (tune), L{iterature} [initially]
6 Author secretly wore tights to dance (5-5)
GHOST-WRITE – Anagram [to dance[ of WORE TIGHTS
7 Material from Derbyshire depressed chap (4,4)
BLUE JOHN – BLUE (depressed), JOHN (chap). I’ve never heard of this.semi-precious mineral aka Debyshire Spar but the wordplay was helpful.
8 You could say we admitted to sick satire (2,2,4)
AS IT WERE – WE contained by [admitted to] anagram [sick] of SATIRE
13 Old prince at graveside finally choosing body (10)
ELECTORATE – ELECTOR (old prince), AT, {gravesid}E [finally]. George I was Elector of Hanover before taking the English throne.
15 Row about books possibly disheartened retired printer (8)
LINOTYPE – LINE (row) contains [about] OT (books) and P{ossibl}Y [disheartened] and reversed [retired]
16 Cleverly sculpted statue likely to be hollow (8)
ASTUTELY – Anagram [sculpted] of STATUE, L{ikel}Y [to be hollow]
18 One million central to assets — that’s a rough guess (8)
ESTIMATE – I (one) + M (million) contained by [central to] ESTATE (assets)
19 Opening cold beer, expose rabble (8)
CANAILLE – C (cold), the NAIL (expose) is contained by [opening] ALE (beer). Another unknown although it appeared without comment from me in 2010.
20 Golden vegetable seen in cultivated land (7)
ORCHARD – OR (golden), CHARD (vegetable)
24 Game found by river — deep but not wide (4)
POLO – PO (river), LO{w} (deep) [not wide]. The answer became obvious once I had first checker from looking up ‘adorable’, but before that I could only think of faro and ludo. Edit: Out of embarrassment  have removed the rubbish I wrote about deep and wide previously, and thanks to ulaca for so gently pointing out my error.  I’d understood that part of the clue whilst solving but went off  on a different tack when writing the blog.   

64 comments on “Times Cryptic 26858”

  1. It’s some comfort to know that Jack had never heard of BLUE JOHN, and didn’t know that meaning of ‘misery’, as these were my LOsI, and since they crossed, they cost me a bunch of time. Biffed CANAILLE, don’t think I’d ever have come up with NAIL for ‘expose’. I didn’t notice the number of classical allusions; but surely, Achilles, Plato, Diogenes, Leander (a frequent guest here), are not esoterica. (Diogenes took me a while, but only because I was looking for a synonym rather than an exemplar; this happens to me a lot in the Concises.)
    1. You’re right of course that the examples you mention are not particularly obscure but it was rather the number of allusions that made my heart sink as I realised what was going on whilst still solving. It began to make me wary as to what he (?) was going to come up with next that might be beyond my limited knowledge of all this stuff.

      Edited at 2017-10-17 05:56 am (UTC)

  2. The South East held me up again but nowhere near yesterdays debacle.

    65 mins. And fairly dull fare as noted.

    FOI 1ac PLATONIC LOI 19dn CANAILLE (biffed)

    COD 27ac DIOGENES – I prefer Euripides as per Frankie Howerd – no – listen – titters in!

    WOD 7dn BLUE JOHN – knowing the answers to the GK helps a lot! When I was 14 we went on hols to Dovedale, ‘well-dressing’ country and the Blue John Mines. Jack, are you getting out enough?

    Tomorrow is Wednesday – all day.

    Edited at 2017-10-17 02:08 am (UTC)

  3. I found this about as hard as yesterday

    Not heard of Longfellow, Blue John, Pilaster, Diogenes, Canaille….

    Also not sure if a leer qualifies as a sidelong glance

    1. I wondered about that too, but Collins has ‘to give an oblique, sneering, or suggestive look or grin’.
  4. 19 minutes for all bar three (10, 19, 27) and another 20 for those, finally wrinkling out CANAILLE. I must say I rather enjoyed this, especially ‘author secretly’ for ghost-write.
  5. Jack, at 24 down, ‘deep but not wide’ merely means to take W from a word meaning deep (LOW, as in a bass voice)!
  6. I had to cheat for BLUE JOHN too, my POI (penultimate one in). I didn’t have MOPE yet, and it couldn’t be BLUE JEAN, singular… So now I know something very interesting about a place called Derbyshire.
    So then it did have to be “MOPE” there, though “misery” is not a synonym in American English.
    The “old prince” ELECTOR is rather too close to the answer to be entirely satisfying (“Is that really it? [Sigh] I guess so…”)
    I was a typographer for twenty-odd years, but I never worked on Linotype.
    As I type this, I am listening to Léo Ferré’s “PARIS CANAILLE.”
  7. BLUE JOHN came up recently, I think. I’d never heard of it before that time, so this time I remembered it. I ground to a halt in the SE again today, struggling with DIOGENESE and CANAILLE and ADORABLE. So went and did some other things, and it all dropped into place later. Except then I mistyped DIOGENES with EE at the end and hit submit. Grrr.

    I also wondered about LEER and NAIL, both of which had what seemed dodgy definitions although it seems the usual sources give the seal of approval.

    1. The most recent occurrence of BLUE JOHN I can find was in 2007 in a puzzle blogged by Foggyweb (anyone else remember him? It was his blogs that encouraged me to put my name forward when PB was looking for a couple of new recruits), but the term was mentioned here in passing in June this year in a comment by Horryd about Matlock in Derbyshire. I was on blogging duty that day so I must have read what he wrote but I’m afraid it didn’t register.
      2. on me (and everyone else) is more up to date than my MI5 file methink. Jack, What did I have breakfast this morning?
  8. 12:18. I felt I had done well with this considering the amount of classical stuff and complete unknowns like BLUE JOHN, and the leaderboard seems to confirm this. At least there weren’t any books of the bible.
    I have learned from past puzzles that Lewis CARROLL was actually called something else, which helped with 5dn even though I didn’t recognise Dodgson.
  9. 50 mins except for DNF on 19dn. Pain au raisin this morning – early before catching train to Glasgow in the wind. Now on Samsung phone (other phones are available).
    Liked Achilles and Ghost Writer.
    But Nail?? Never.
    Thanks setter and Jack.
    1. Expose for nail is a bit oblique perhaps but it is in all the usual dictionaries (ODO, Collins, Chambers).
      1. A fair cop. I humbly accept that ‘to nail a lie or rumour’ looks to be well known – except by me.

        Now I have more time – let me also speak up for: Lonesome, ‘As it were’, Electorate, Diogenes, and Tetrarch. I liked it.

        And I am back in Edinburgh and the wind has dropped. The sun is shining: all is right with the world.

  10. Doing well until the rabble turned up (or failed to turn up). Liked the GHOST WRITER and “Butter in”.
  11. The most boring puzzle I’ve completed in a very long time. They should put this setter back in the box and not let him/her out until they have become acquainted with the modern world
    1. I don’t know which of my colleagues set this puzzle, but I do find the above comments a bit ungenerous. The vocabulary and clues were fair, and some of the clues indeed were very elegant. The words were geared towards the classics, but so what? In crosswordland we rejoice in the words of science, religion, history, geography, literature, and so on, but any one puzzle can only span a limited number of these. Don Manley
      1. Up to a point, but too much in one puzzle is a bit boring. I derived more pleasure from your QC today (grovel, grovel!)
      2. As I said in my post, I found it enjoyable, despite my classical education ending with ‘O’ level Latin in 1961. There are a few days when I curse at my slow progress, but it’s more common that lack of intelligence rather than lack of knowledge is the reason. It’s a big thank you from me to all the setters who make my mornings so enjoyable.
      1. That’s all right – Vinyl knows that all the female contributors here also solve the puzzles with annoying rapidity.
  12. Dnk CANAILLE at all, no bells ringing now…Have limited myself to 30 minutes, so a dnf despite steady solve of all but two clues. Thanks jack and setter.

    Edited at 2017-10-17 08:35 am (UTC)

  13. 28 minutes, knackered after a trip to the National and ‘Follies’ last night, my wife’s idea of course. Two and a quarter hours with no interval is pushing it, Mr Sondheim. Good stuff, though. I knew TETRARCH from the successors to Herod the Great. BLUE JOHN( a pseudonym for the Baptist’s head on a silver platter?) was a write-in as we went down the eponymous cavern at Castleton on a youth club bank holiday excursion once upon a time. Biffed and then checked LOI CANAILLE, as NAIL for ‘expose’ is a bit of a stretch, but I couldn’t think of any better N??L filler. I think I was aware that you can call someone a MOPE. DIOGENES was dredged up from somewhere with helpful cryptic and crossers. COD ELECTORATE, and the Hanoverian succession when poor old Sophia missed being our Queen by a whisker. Enjoyable puzzle. Thank you Jack and setter.

    Edited at 2017-10-17 10:40 am (UTC)

  14. Beaten by CANAILLE. Despite having the C and ALE, the strange synonym for NAIL and the double unch did for me. Rather dull and dreary stuff for the second day running.
  15. I didn’t enjoy this much despite the welter of classical references (which I have nothing against) – it just seemed rather prosaically clued, for such interesting vocab. No sub-10m time for me either – I got stuck at the end on both the ADORABLE/POLO and RESIDENT/BLUE JOHN crossers for some minutes at the end. Not enough for my tired brain to latch onto, especially in the second case where I was convinced the second word was going to be DOWN. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow to find my apparently long-lost form again!
  16. 25 mins with the last 5 or so spent on CANAILLE, a word which I’d totally forgotten and had to be teased out from the WP after I finally saw what the clue was telling me to do. I breezed through the LHS but the RHS proved far trickier, and I had trouble with both the BLUE JOHN/MOPE crossers and the POLO/ADORABLE/DIOGENES combination.
  17. I can’t see any problem with nail = expose. Collins has “to expose or detect (a lie or liar)”, and if you say that Private Eye nailed Robert Maxwell, I don’t think anyone would need recourse to the dictionary.
    1. Beat me to it. All the usual dictionaries explicitly define ‘nail’ using the word ‘expose’.
    2. I think I probably *should* have headed for my dictionary whenever I’ve heard it, as I had no idea it meant “expose”…
  18. Thought this one just fine but got held up by ‘canaille’ as some others. Nothing wrong with a scattering of classical references; it is The Times crossword after all, and not a pub quiz. Thank you setter for an enjoyable half hour (most of which spent on the aforementioned).
  19. Sorry to bother you and I don’t know if this is the right place to post this. I’m way behind with my crosswords and, having just completed J1287, wanted to check the parsing of some of the clues (too many to write up here!).
    It’s not in the archives although October 14 does show two blogs; unfortunately only one blog (the Saturday crossword) actually appears.
    Thanks in advance for any help.
    Adrian Cobb

    P.S. I have also posted this message as a comment on the last Jumbo blogged.

    1. The blogger was johninterred but, as keriothe says, it looks like his account is suspended – I think he comments here most days so perhaps he’ll be able to shed some light later.
      1. Help! I don’t know what’s going on, but my account does indeed seem to be suspended. I’ve raised a request with the support team asking why and for it to be restored.

        johninterred

    2. The puzzle has been blogged: I just searched for it using the LJ search function and got a message saying ‘this journal has been suspended’! Mysterious.
    3. Hi Adrian. My account was mistakenly suspended as a potential source of spam, which resulted in all my blog posts and comments becoming hidden. My account has now been restored so you can find my blog for J1287 on Oct 14th. Enjoy!
  20. 27:46 but a bit like yesterday with no real smile moments. Sherlock Holmes’s elder brother Mycroft frequented the Diogenes Club where members were not allowed to talk or even recognise the existence of other members. If forced to nominate a COD GHOST-WRITE.
  21. DNF due to (a) too many unknowns and (b) having TINTYPER for 15d which still looks like a good answer to me – TIER (row) containing NT (books) and PY reversed.

    I’m in the minority that found BLUE JOHN easy, having visited the caverns many times (they’re nowhere near Matlock by the way).

    Thanks as usual for an interesting blog.

  22. I had all kinds of difficulty this one – ADORABLE, CANAILLE (never heard of it) & DIOGENES the last to go. Unfortunately I put POGO for 24d, no doubt worn out after 19m 24s of puzzle.
  23. Yes, this did look a bit like a visitor from planet TLS (some of us like those puzzles). I’m not sure if CANAILLE crops up in Tale Of Two Cities but I’ve certainly seen it in the context of the French Revolution. Some friends of my parents gave me a BLUE JOHN vase for a wedding present which was very nice of them – to remind me of Old England since I was going to be living in NY. 16.33
    1. How about the context of ‘Iolanthe’? Where members of the House of Lords sing
      Our lordly style
      You shall not quench
      With base canaille!
  24. I used to eat in a Belgian restaurant which served steak with ‘sauce canaille’. It was translated for me as ‘mad dog sauce’ – which I suppose fits with ‘rabble’. Tomato puree, green peppercorns and tabasco – delicious!
    1. I wonder if it’s complete coincidence that CANAILLE is derived from the word for a dog, as is “Cynic”, apparently because it was DIOGENES’ style: “When asked why he was called a dog he replied, ‘I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.'”

      Edited at 2017-10-17 07:11 pm (UTC)

  25. I was pleased to find I completed this in 36:01, after feeling as though I was struggling to make progress. Large areas of the grid remained blank while I teased out answers. NODE was my FOI closely followed by PLATONIC. BLUE JOHN was a write in as I have a piece of it on my mantelpiece with a little miner attached, a relic of a visit to the caverns long ago. I was surprised not to be stumped by the plethora of Greeks, but they all came to heel, with DIOGENES holding out for longest until I had the crossers. I knew what I was looking for at 19d, but it took a little while for NAIL to spring to mind. Once I had ADORABLE, I was greatly assisted by the probability of it ending LLE and starting with CAN. TETRARCH was lurking somewhere in the depths, but if you’d asked me to define it, I’d have struggled. I was held up by biffing CHARLES at 5d, even though I struggled to parse it. LONGFELLOW finally showed me the error of my ways and I saw the obvious(assuming you know the alter ego). I have to say I quite enjoyed this puzzle. Thanks setter and Jack.

    Edited at 2017-10-17 01:19 pm (UTC)

  26. Enjoyable, but then I’m not an Ancient Graecophobe, and the clues were bang on. Nor were the ‘classical’ entries difficult or obscure, so I’m a bit baffled by the haters today.

    Mind you, I’m sure I remember the same sort of thing coming up here and there before in this blog, so can anyone explain why classical stuff draws so much fire? Harking back to a time of elitism in The Times puzzle perhaps?

    1. Many years ago there was a compulsory word from a Shakepeare play or Sir Walter Scott et al. That appears to be confined these days to the TLS crossword (no longer available hereabouts)

      If it’s difficult you enjoy go for Mephisto where a classical education is useful, or if you like pain The Club Monthly.
      They only recommend about four dictionaries that might be useful to finish the job!

      It’s all a bit tedious. The Times 15×15 is at a decent level recently, with the South East corner and Fridays being tough going, but generally fun. A good GK is useful so being widely read is the answer.

      As for the Greek its all Greek to me as I only studied Latin!

      nils desperandum!

      Edited at 2017-10-17 03:58 pm (UTC)

      1. Hi Horryd

        But in Mephisto and Club Monthly, you’re going to struggle on wordplay no matter what the word. And in the daily sometimes! But that wasn’t the case here, with well-known if ancient references, and well-made clues with — as some have already said — real elegance. So with the possible exception of Blue John (not a classical reference as far as I know) I’m not sure I quite know what the fuss is about. For a Tuesday I thought this well-positioned, and well worth the entrance fee.

  27. I actually enjoyed this. Maybe because I knew all the classical references. I think the Scarlet Pimpernel helped with the French rabble – anyway, I saw it straight away. 30 minutes. Ann
  28. This took me about 25 minutes, held up by not having heard of CANAILLE previously, and by being mystified at what was required for MOPE. I eventually threw them both in, assuming that there was some noun usage of MOPE that came close to misery, but it’s not within the norm to me. The ancients all appeared without too much trouble. Regards.
  30. Another day, another DNF. Got all but a few in the SE and the last word of 7d this morning, but another twenty minutes this evening left me still with the last word of 7d and 19d still to do. I’d got the wordplay as far as “N__L” for expose, but nothing at all sprang to mind, and I was fairly mystified to see that “nail” was the answer that might have provided me with the utterly unknown CANAILLE.

    Ho hum. I did take a solving break of a few days recently; perhaps I need a longer holiday!

  31. Nice puzzle, good blog, thanks. Got through it pretty quick. On balance, I’d rather have references to antiquity than obscure animals, birds and plants.
  32. This one took me simply ages. I can’t blame it on the classics because I knew platonic, Achilles, Leander and Diogenes, I just found myself off the wavelength and always seemed to be looking at things the wrong way round. Tetrarch and pilaster took a while to arrive but the only unknowns were Blue John and canaille for which I just had to trust my reading of the word play. Frustrating not to be able to tune into the wavelength because it led to a very slow and disrupted solving experience. I liked the butter in and the author secretly.
  33. This is my second DNF in a row. So either the Monday and Tuesday puzzles were unusually difficult, or my other neuron is on the blink again. Sadly, the statistics say that the latter is likelier.

    I was beaten by DIOGENES and CANAILLE. The former I had heard of (though I had no idea he was a cynic). The latter I hadn’t and, sticking to my maxim that any word I don’t know is unfairly obscure, I am now grumpy. Roll on Brexit, when we can finally be rid of these foreign interlopers into the language.

  34. 3-Jan-2018 in South China Morning Post
    This took me too long, although I do have the classical background.
    DNK: BLUE JOHN, CANAILLE, CHARD, PILASTER. Well I know them now! 🙂
    Nit: a LINOTYPE is a typesetter, not a printer
    5D same word clued better a couple of days before. Too easy: why “Dodgson” and not “Author”? There could have been ellipses linking to 6D, to reflect the common surface and this would have helped with misdirection on 6D, already an excellent clue.
    Thanks to setter and blogger.

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