Times Cryptic 28292

96 comments on “Times Cryptic 28292”

1. I was very slow at first, going through nearly all the across clues without seeing anything, until finally putting in red-hot. The downs were a little easier. I too had stab in the back, which was erased when I put in legal tender. I saw that it might be face, but what is a stab in the face? Then I saw I had to change the first word as well, and triumphantly finished.

   I could very easily have gotten stuck on grub and singular, but they came to me.

   Time: 23 minutes.

2. My biggest hold-up was BARSET…scratched my head for ages for anything else that fit in there, and decided to bung it in. Surprised to find it was right – 14:08.

   1. ‘Bother said the King and bounced out of bed!’

      My time was slightly up on yesterday’s at 44 mins, after a rather slow start.
      FOI 1dn BATMAN Holy ****!
      LOI 11ac TOMB
      COD 15ac BARSET
      WOD 11dn BOTANIC GARDEN – my favourite is Singapore.

      1. Nobody could call me a fussy man… Welcome back Horryd!

3. I’m not sure ‘county booked’ quite works, but I got it, so no complaints. AGRIPPA is fast replacing conspirator CINNA as the setters’ go-to Roman of choice. Being surrounded by, it must be said, rather uncouth Australians here in Hong Kong, ‘ripper’ is common currency, even if usually applied to a thing not a person.

   A tip of the hat to the setter for clueing the cricketer as BATSMAN. The execrable cancel-culture ‘batter’ is now prescribed in commentary boxes and press rooms alike. There is enough ugliness in the world already…

   16:20

   1. Couldn’t agree more about BATSMAN v. “batter”. Believe it or not there are some vaguely couth Australians who have been known to use ‘ripper’ every now and then.

   2. Of course, in baseball batter is the stock term. Batter up!

   3. IMHO Batswoman would be a syllable too far. Batter is fine. As someone once said, “The times they are a’changing”.

      1. Batsman for a man is fine; batter for a woman is fine.

         Vive la difference!

         Censorship is not fine.

   4. I played cricket from the 50s through to the 90s. Down here in Hampshire batter was common usage from the mid 60s.
      Nothing to do with pc of course.

   5. 41 mins but dnf – Barset did for me. Trollopes

   6. Don’t mind batter but no reason why batsman and batswoman should not be used. They describe the person in the middle more exactly.

      Presumably the Caped Crusader would prefer the sobriquet of Batman to also persist (as would those who hold the copyright…)

4. Finished in 42 minutes after finally seeing BARSET and TOMB. Latin studies helped with SINGULAR, DECLENSION ,and AGRIPPA. Never read the novels but remembering the humorous 80’s Barchester Chronicles television series led me to BARSET. COD to CHAMBERMAID. Never thought of caterpillar as a GRUB.Needed lots of help to fully parse many- thanks.

5. Barset came up in the past 6 months or so, and just about stuck in my memory as something bookish, so easy today. Singular and legal tender last 2 in, but not with any holdups, just happened to be last. Puzzled by 1dn thinking BAT was the cricketer, embarrassingly unable to parse it
   COD chambermaid.

6. 35 minutes. Luckily saw GRUB and SINGULAR – which I parsed as a double def – early on. ‘Maybe involved in car accident’ = HAD A BASH? ‘Maybe’.

   ‘Last home’ was TOMB (true). Favourite was the ‘county booked’ for BARSET; instant word associations = Obadiah Slope = Alan Rickman.

   1. It was the first time I’d ever seen Alan Rickman, or at least the first time his name registered. It was a wonderful series. I bought and rewatched it on DVD only a few years ago.

      1. For me, Alan Rickman = Sheriff of Nottingham; though I have seen the Barset dvd as well. Not to mention Galaxy Quest. And wasn’t he in Emma? Come to think of it, he had quite a range, didn’t he? A very fine actor, and losing him and Victoria Wood so early and in the same month was a blow.

         1. Alan Rickman as the Metatron, the Voice of God, in Dogma has a special place in my heart. Trademark sarcastic leavened with moments of extraordinary tenderness.

            1. Great film!

               1. …as was Truly Madly Deeply

   2. Absolutely agree with the Slope/Rickman association. How did he make so many characters his own like that? I am thinking the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood

7. Like George, I was slowed down by LOI BARSET. I was trying and failing to come up with the word for lawyers collectively, and even toyed with DASSET for a while, as well as DORSET–actually checking to make sure AGRIPPA was OK. Biffed BOTANIC GARDEN and LEGAL TENDER. 17:05.

   1. BARSET was my LOI, too. And I also thought of DASSET.

8. Well, this must the point to say, this new site is a ripper!

   LOI, 3D. D’oh … that sort of case.

9. 35m 12s…..but 6 mins of that was spent on my LOI BARSET. I’ve never read any Trollope and all I could think of was Borsetshire which is, as Jack says, in The Archers. After a couple of minutes of pondering the clue I decided to think it over while giving Bianca her weekly groom. The answer then came very quickly.
   Thank you, Jack for CHAMBERMAID.
   COD: TARGET.
   PS….I do hope all our avatar-less people acquire one. It makes it more fun!

   1. What a considerate husband you are! Bianca is a lucky lady.

      1. 🤣🤣

10. BARSET was my best guess, though the word was only very vaguely familiar. Indeed, I looked at the blog before I realized I hadn’t filled that one in yet.
    BATMAN was a cricket clue that surely crossed the Atlantic successfully.
    I’ve never been to the Brooklyn BOTANIC GARDEN, though it’s been recommended by friends. This is one of a number here that I bunged in before entirely parsing (CHAMBERMAID being another).
    The “press chief” in UNEDITED is not sufficiently distinct from the meaning of ED(IT) in the answer, à mon avis.
    I immediately thought of SLAP IN THE FACE for 4, and so noted that it is too easy—as well as being one of those CDs that is just barely C. A non-cryptic crossword could define SLAP IN THE FACE by “Insult” alone, but no one would think twice if “Stinging” were added. What exactly is “cryptic”about it? Seemingly only the context of its appearing in this puzzle, leading the solver to look for something more. I may present a sermon about this kind of thing from my pulpit here on Sunday.

    1. It’s cryptic in the sense that ‘stinging’ as applied to an insult is usually figurative, so the clue is tricking you to think that way whereas in fact it’s being used literally. It’s not much of a trick, admittedly!

    2. Look forward to it, Guy du Gethsemane. Quarrington.

11. I got BARSET without too much trouble. About 50 years ago The Times used to have a setter who was as keen on the Barsetshire Chronicles as other setters are on Dickens. I must have been a teenager since I was doing the crossword with my mother (how I learned how cryptic crosswords worked). These were usually answers that required all the crossers since neither my mother nor I had ever read the books (and the TV series was decades in the future).

    Like others it seems, my next to last one in was GRUB followed by SINGULAR. I assumed 23A started with A, which should have made 17D easy, but not surprisingly it didn’t work. Eventually, I saw GRUB and then clicked on SINGULAR.

    I think that the way 17D works is that SINGULAR is an odd number but “number” is singular grammatically. “A number of people is…” not “A number of people are…”

    I always ran an ad-blocker on the old site, so I never saw any ads. I had no idea that some of them were in Russian.

    1. I know what you’re getting at re SINGULAR, but in the phrase “a number of people,” “a number of” means “many” and the following verb would be “are” or some other plural. You’re thinking of phrases like “the number of people who hate Putin is constantly increasing,” where “number” is the actual subject.
       https://www.lexico.com/explore/number-of-people-is-or-are
       gives the example
       A number of people are waiting for the bus.

    2. Grammatical number is a category; English has two, singular and plural, some languages have dual as well. I’d say this clue was a DD: odd, and number, grammatically. “A number of people is waiting to see you” is ungrammatical, although the word ‘number’ is singular.

       1. Agree.

       2. The dual is a feature of Slavic languages (and maybe others) as I dimly recall from my days of learning Czech by the book rather than, as eventually turned out more efficient, by the pint. I’ve forgotten the grammatical terms, but I still speak it moderately well and know that the practical implication is that Czech has a plural form of the number one as well as a singular form for each of three genders. Bonkers, you say? Well, not quite: use the singular when ordering your chips and you’ll get one chip, no more and no less; it’s the plural form which guarantees you one portion containing multiple chips. Effectively it takes the place of our modifiers, as in (a portion of) chips, (a pair of) trousers, etc. OK: well, I find it interesting!

          1. And arabic. Kitab = book; kutub = books; kitabain = 2 books

       3. Well, English did have a dual, but it was lost in the confusion following the Norman Conquest.

12. Glad to see some other people were also slow to see TOMB; it didn’t help that the question mark in the HAD A BASH clue appears to be doing some quite heavy lifting. My most troublesome pair were GRUB and LOI SINGULAR, though. 29 mins all told though, so not terribly taxing overall.

13. … he stooped over the airy shore, And Plunged all noiseless into the deep night.

    25 mins pre-brekker. No ticks, 4 crosses, 3 MERs.
    Thanks setter and J.

14. I had a great Dylan song reference to a CHAMBERMAID too, but those days are behind. 28 minutes with LOI DECLENSION. Decline nouns and conjugate verbs. I hope my old Latin master Jack Clough is proud of me remembering that 61 years after O Level. With apologies to those hankering after BAT(S)MAN, in Lancashire we always called them batters. I’d like to claim this as a triumph for our enlightened attitude, but the closest women got to playing was the pavilion to make the teas. Won and ONE are not remotely homophones in the northern counties of course, but as K will say, it’s the London Times. Bring back the Manchester Guardian! COD to LEGAL TENDER. Thank you Jack and setter.

    1. We called them batters because that was what they did to the opposition.

       1. This and other contributions can only be from the artist formerly known as PhilJordan. Let’s wallow in those memories when the other 16 counties used to play each other to see who’d meet Lanky in the Gillette Final. O my Pilling and my Clive Lloyd long ago!

15. 8:27. Like some others I started slowly on this, but found the downs easier than the acrosses.
    MER at HAD A BASH. BASH isn’t used to mean ‘car crash’, at least according to my experience and the usual dictionaries.

    1. I think the ‘Maybe’ implies that it is not necessarily a known expression for crashing a car.

    2. Bash

       I hope I indicated in my blog that the car crash element was a bit iffy. I referred to it as ‘more of a cryptic hint’ (than a proper definition) and didn’t use bold typeface when marking up the clue. But since we also have a straight definition (tried) I don’t think it’s unreasonable as a supporting act. Chambers and Collins have bash as ‘crash into’ and Lexico and Collins have ‘collide with’.

       Edit: And as Pootle has pointed out whilst I was writing, ‘maybe’ is there to serve in mitigation.

       1. I believe it is ‘bingle’ in Australia. Meldrew

16. After a lot of mucking about with Windows and browser settings, I managed to improve the readability of the puzzle significantly, and had a go despite cataract problem.

    All fairly straightforward until I found myself bogging down a bit, so took a break around 28m to visit the supermarket before it got busy. Upon returning, I breezed through the remaining 7 or 8 clues mostly by guessing from the crossers, then finding out the guesses were correct – a fun way to do it! Unfamiliar with Trollope, so BARSET was a hopeful stab. Finished on the GRUB / SINGULAR crossing at 32:38.

    Agree with GdS about UNEDITED and S.I.T.F. – thanks Jack and setter.

    1. There were too many trollops with whom I unfortunately became familiar over the years 🙄

17. 18 mins which is my quickest of late
    Worked from East to West with Barset as my last Had to confirm it was a literary clue though

18. 11:28. At a glance I managed to make an anagram of COTTAGE GARDEN at 11D but fortunately I saw my error before too long. BARSET was helped by the fact I’ve recently downloaded some Trollope with the intention of finding out about this place that is periodically referenced in the crossword. I’ve yet to actually start reading though. I was going to say that I didn’t understand SINGULAR, but having seen Kevin’s explanation above I think that is correct.

19. 42 mins with an interruption and being held up by (apologies to Ulaca and others) having bunged in batter. Once I saw the light, the rest of the NW went in quickly.

    I liked BANANA SKIN and CHAMBERMAID most.

    Thanks Jack (esp for parsing LEGAL TENDER which I hadn’t) and setter.

20. 8:53. Lots to enjoy in this, not least my LOI TOMB when I saw it. I liked BANANA SKIN too. Thank-you Jackkt and setter.

    1. Haha very disappointed 35 min..but I thought I was doing the QC…so very delighted. I don’t often attempt the 15×15. Something must be sinking in and hope for all stuck in the QC rut!
       Many thanks as always

       1. Just checking how replies manifest themselves🤔

21. 27 minutes. Held up at the end by BARSET, which I eventually put in with no great confidence – I don’t know my Trollope and thought that ‘booked’ was cluing ‘set’, so for a while I was looking for a county that fit _A_ and a collective term for lawyers. BATMAN also went in unparsed, but no problems otherwise.

    FOI Come to
    LOI Barset
    COD Brandish

22. 14.10. Very relieved to see Barset was right. Good puzzle to start the ball rolling. LOI smooth.
    Very much like the new layout. Easy on the eye and less clunky than Putin’s!

23. Just over eight minutes, but might have had a very rare excursion under seven, if I’d remembered how to spell Agrippa.

24. 13.17 after a fairly slow start. A puzzle swinging wildly between the sublime, the fabulous carbon dating anagram, the “series of cases” and the complex but smooth UNIMPAIRED, and the rather ridiculous. I mean “Robin helped him”: who could that be? And the practically non-cryptic SLAP…

    1. My first thoughts for “Robin helped him” were Friar Tuck or Will Scarlet.

25. Two errors, barsat and legal gender!

    COD more.

    1. I very much like LEGAL GENDER!

26. Took me a while to think of SMOOTH for hairless which was slow of me because I’ve always loved Alan Bennett’s take on Jacob and Esau. SINGULAR reminded me of the finale in A Chorus Line – One Singular Sensation. I was thinking that the only “ripper” I know of is Jack but then recalled that my grandmother used to say “ripping” – meaning wonderful in 1920s slang. 16.54

27. 07:08, so the purplish patch continues apace. Spotted the slightly loose things which have been covered by others, but none of them felt really likely to derail me. If you’re a regular solver, you don’t any extra bran in your diet, of course.

28. Like others quite slow to start but eventually all went smoothly enough and I finished in 32 minutes. And like others I was uncomfortable with the SINGULAR clue until it was explained.

    A slight problem that I have with the new site which for some reason I didn’t have before, possibly because the avatars were bigger, is that if a comment refers to something in the blog and one scrolls back to see what the blog says, it’s tricky to come back to where one was in the comments. I’m not sure how one can get over this, but someone may have ideas…

    1. You can mostly achieve that by clicking on the slider in the scroll bar on the right, holding your mouse button down. Move the slider up to the top to see the blog, and without releasing the mouse button, move the mouse pointer to the right way outside the browser window. At a certain distance the slider will “release” from the mouse and pop back to its start point.

       1. Isla, this idea was new to me so I experimented and got it to work eventually but the ‘release and pop back’ happened when I moved the mouse pointer to the left, way inside the browser window. Moving it outside to the right just scrolled me through each item down the page. It’s a great tip and I shall use it a lot in the future, so thank you.

29. I just had a thought: perhaps the failure of my posts to show an avatar was because I hadn’t logged in (something that I didn’t seem to have to do before), so I tried to log in and was told that there was nobody with this email address. The email address was certainly correct because I clicked on the address that came up as I started typing. I wonder why it said that.

    1. Hello, This may not work for you, but I initially had the same problem. After you registered via the Menu at the top right, an email should have been sent to you with a link to confirm the registration. The email to me ended up in my Spam folder, so it might be worth checking there if you didn’t receive it in your Inbox.

    2. Will, You need to register using the “Register” link in the top menu, click on the link in the verification email you are sent and then you can visit “My Account” and edit your profile (using the link there). That will allow you to upload an avatar. Note that although the system has any comments you made on Livejournal with the avatar you used there it is a ghost account which you cannot log into. Instead you need to register for the new site separately.

30. I was beginning to panic when my FOI only appeared in the bottom half of the puzzle, but then I nailed 7 of the first 8 down clues and all was well. A few decent clues, but definitely a curate’s egg of a puzzle.

    FOI COME TO
    LOI SINGULAR
    COD DECLENSION
    TIME 8:37

31. 30’22”, of which the last five or so were spent looking for SINGULAR. COD to the mad relatives who gave me a smile.

32. 24:21
    Straightforward solve.
    Thanks, jack.

33. Not a problem with this, 18 minutes, TOMB my LOI and should have seen it sooner. I am a fan of Barsetshire (6 books and the DVD with Alan Rickman) so no delay there. Belated thanks and congrats to those who have brought us away from the Russians.

34. 18:19. BARSET was the only significant hold up, dallying with DASSET and DORSET en route. Nice, efficient sort of puzzle.

35. 36:59. Unlike others, plunged straight in with FOI 1ac BRANDISH then 5ac SMOOTH. Then it got quite tricky, with a somehow unfamiliar feel. Several were easier to biff than parse. LOI CHAMBERMAID and COD

36. Just seeing if the italics work. They do

37. I solved some of the clues easily, but others bamboozled me for ages. I eventually saw how BARSET worked, but haven’t read any Trollope, although I’m aware of the fictional county. TAR was FOI, followed by BATMAN and AGRIPPA, but it was a lot later before the penny dropped for BRANDISH. I was interrupted by a phone call from the dentist asking me if I could turn up this afternoon instead of Thursday and forgot to pause the puzzle, so I suppose that distracted me a bit. A bit of drilling and filling to endure, although my teeth seem to be in better shape than might be expected after the lockdown lack of professional attention. At one stage I resorted to buying dental filler from Amazon to stuff in an unexpected chasm. STAB IN THE BACK was finally corrected to SLAP IN THE FACE after I obtained some LEGAL TENDER. Like BW I was please to remember DECLENSION after all these years. UNIMPAIRED was a late entry, just preceding the aforementioned coin of the realm, and the corrected insult. 28:45, including interruption. Thanks setter and Jack.

    1. John hope your Hampsteads are now sorted. Please excuse me for using this reply to check the é in my login name.

       1. Yes, thanks Rosédeprovence. Sadly he’s discovered a bit more work to do which involves a root canal jobbie. Original work all sorted though.

    2. Is it something about Middlesbrough? You and Bob Mortimer both do your own dentistry. Sales of Fuji 9 must be soaring there. Do you get it from Boot’s or Jewson’s?

       1. We have to be self contained up here in’t frozen North!

38. 45 minutes for a very enjoyable solve. BARSET LOI, although I have read the novels. I was fixated on DORSET (unparsed), and had convinced myself that AGRIPPA could be AGRIPPO. 11d was no problem – Mrs R is at RHS Wisley today, giving me time to tackle the 15 x 15. Thanks all.

39. I’m another who’s lurked for years and have now decided to add my tuppence worth.
    Congrats on the new system. Having worked in IT all my working life, starting with Hollerith machines and then computer software development, I know the pressures you’ve been under. Particularly the temptation to skimp on testing.
    So we’ll done to all concerned.

    1. Welcome jch. I like to greet newbies with a colourful and cheery Welcome! banner but haven’t figured out how to achieve this yet in our new home.

40. 23:53

    Slow start with only four acrosses going in on first pass.

    Pleased with DECLENSION (from the O checker only) as I never studied Latin formally.

    Somehow was aware of BARSET/BARSETSHIRE though have never read any Trollope – probably from previous xwords?

    Not sure of SINGULAR – LEGAL TENDER gave the final checker so it was a bit of a hit-and-hope

41. 20 enjoyable minutes. I wasn’t sure if there was a BARSET as well as a BARSETSHIRE, but the cryptic was clear. Most shire counties are named after a town therein, eg my county FLINTSHIRE, so I’d have thought that BARSET would be a town. But I am quibbling.
    New pic, this ones from a fabulous beach in the north of Iona, that well crossworded isle.

    1. eniamretrauq

       Apparently Trollope used both Barset and Barsetshire to refer to the county and its county town was Barchester — cf Dorset / Dorsetshire / Dorchester and The Archers Borset / Borsetshire and Borchester.

42. I parsed SINGULAR as a double definition, with “Odd” a direct synonym and “number, gramatically” as a second definition (admittedly by example).

43. 46 1/2 minutes, after finally mustering the courage to enter BARSET. And I find it very annoying when ALMOST an entire puzzle is manageable, if not entirely easy, and just one clue requires me to make a wild, though obviously informed, guess. I agree with everyone else’s MERs, above, but there were some nice clues, too. I liked BRAN DISH and P LUNG ED quite a lot.

44. 18.26. I couldn’t quite see how singular worked and was misled for too long by declension, those sorts of cases, doh! Cricketer out in the middle was very nice. A couple like on a roll and slap in the face put up far too little resistance, perhaps they escaped from the QC. For me had a bash was not sufficiently related to car accident in meaning for that one too work.

45. Finished in about 30minutes. Must have been very easy since, as a beginner at this cryptic stuff, it normally takes me all day(off and on).Couldn’t parse 29 ac but didn’t think it could be anything else.

46. Well, I am beginning to get a bit angsty about Tuesday crosswords, as for a few weeks now they have been the most difficult of the week for me – just not on the wavelength and requiring a lot more work than usual. However, all well in the end, and no complaints. Liked TAR, SMOOTH and CHAMBERMAID. BARSET, too, brought back memories of the wonderful Alan Rickman, first encountered on that series. I must get around to reading the books some day…

47. I recall not ONE SINGULAR DECLENSION
    Nor if AGRIPPA ALSO got a mention
    I thought Latin was dumb
    And “Romani ite domum”
    Is surely Python’s finest comic invention

    1. Tua verba verissima sunt!

48. john interred I followed your instructions and clicked on the link in the email that I was sent. then went to My Account (I didn’t actually, as there was no heading by that name, but I clicked on LOG IN and the first thing said My Account, so I assume that was what was meant) and was told ‘Error: Incorrect username or password’. I’d set up a password using a generated one and clicking on the thing that invites you to remember this password automatically.

49. LOI BARSET like so many others but glad it was correct so I could chalk up successful completion.
    I’m a very slow solver so rarely post a comment but the “Johninterred” post (17.56 at 4.56pm) was very useful because I didn’t know how to add my avatar. I wonder if those instructions need to be put somewhere more prominent to pick up the occasional people like me.

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