There were a lot of neat clues here, like 6 and 14 ac, and the cute idea at 23 and 24 dn. Thanks, setter. How did all you solvers get on with this one?
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Definitions are in bold and underlined.
| Across | |
| 1 | Son flusters agitatedly, not relaxing (9) |
| STRESSFUL – S + anagram (agitatedly) of FLUSTERS. | |
| 6 | Womaniser harbouring love for female author (5) |
| WOOLF – WOLF harbouring O. I was tempted to spell this WOLFF for some reason. |
|
| 9 | One takes long time in cutter (7) |
| MACHETE – ME (one) takes ACHE+T. | |
| 10 | Close to loading most of rubbish in the cloud? (7) |
| NEBULAR – NEAR (close to) loading BULL (most of rubbish) | |
| 11 | One proverbially mad bachelor stops helmsman who will go on (10) |
| CHATTERBOX – HATTER (proverbially mad, perhaps as a result of mercury poisoning) + B stops COX. | |
| 12 | Jumper perhaps, horseman clearing good height (4) |
| KNIT – KNIGHT (clearing G + H) | |
| 14 | Expand entry to Eurovision to replace EU member’s song (5) |
| BULGE – E to replace ARIA in BULGARIA. Clever. | |
| 15 | Nasty old casket holding new debt records (9) |
| OBNOXIOUS – O + BOX holding N + IOUS. | |
| 16 | Setter free to be liar cryptically, right? (9) |
| LIBERATOR – anagram (cryptically) of TO BE LIAR + R. | |
| 18 | Almost approximate what’s commonest in genetic make-up (5) |
| ROUGE – ROUGh (approximate, almost) + E (there are more E’s than any other letter in GENETIC). | |
| 20 | What occurs in tub at home? (4) |
| BATH – hidden answer, and an &lit. (meaning the whole clue is definition). | |
| 21 | Fan forum, show broadcast without any female? Not this one! (6,4) |
| WOMAN’S HOUR – anagram (broadcast) of fAN fORUM SHOW (without any F’s). Clever, again. | |
| 25 | More than half of States embracing NY Opera’s current shower (7) |
| AMMETER – AMERICA embracing MET (the N.Y. Metropolitan Opera). | |
| 26 | Observed swarm in place for debarking? (7) |
| SAWMILL – SAW + MILL (swarm/mill around). | |
| 27 | Study the writer’s tough stuff (5) |
| DENIM – DEN + I’M. | |
| 28 | Through and through all parts of Hebrides? (5,4) |
| EVERY INCH – apparently, all the Hebridean islands are inches. Is that so? | |
| Down | |
| 1 | Problem with air-conditioning plant (5) |
| SUMAC – SUM (problem?), A/C. I think, in the age of spreadsheets, a problem is something harder than just a sum. |
|
| 2 | Gibraltar? Quite a smaller bit of Britain (7) |
| ROCKALL – ROCK (Gibraltar), ALL (quite – quite finished, for example). | |
| 3 | Duck skin growth with boil around its head (10) |
| SWEETHEART – SEETHE (boil) around the head [first letter] of WART. Tricky! | |
| 4 | Less inhibited about blocking rise of judge (5) |
| FREER – RE blocking REF rising. | |
| 5 | Person with deeds that’ll crash office network? (9) |
| LANDOWNER – a LAN DOWNER … brought to you by CrowdStrike, perhaps. | |
| 6 | Curt direction to restrict bishop’s networks (4) |
| WEBS – WESt to restrict B. | |
| 7 | Gold light round protagonist changing sex (7) |
| ORLANDO – OR (gold), LAND (light), O. This Orlando appears in a Virginia Woolf novel; not the Shakespearean character. Coincidentally, Orlando appeared with similar cluing in Jumbo No 1682, the blog for which appeared on the same Saturday as this puzzle came out. |
|
| 8 | Early awareness of strength, receiving letters from Athens (9) |
| FORETASTE – FORTE receiving ETAS (Greek letters). | |
| 13 | US fast track technique no longer used by journalists? (10) |
| EXPRESSWAY – EX (no longer used), PRESS WAY. | |
| 14 | William Shakespeare entering Globe’s promotional space (9) |
| BILLBOARD – BILL (William), BARD (Shakespeare) with entering of O (globe). Think of entering data into a spreadsheet, not of you entering a room. | |
| 15 | Use another company for couture, so shocking (9) |
| OUTSOURCE – anagram (shocking) of COUTURE SO. | |
| 17 | Corporation boring well in France supplies tar product (7) |
| BITUMEN – TUM boring BIEN. | |
| 19 | Worked out mostly grand, say, like sunlit uplands? (7) |
| UTOPIAN – anagram (worked) of OUT + PIANo (“grand”, say, mostly). The definition misled me for a while. | |
| 22 | Space between shelves with edges trimmed in swirly pattern (5) |
| AISLE – the pattern is pAISLEy. | |
| 23 | Man possibly reading half of all the letters … (5) |
| RALPH – R (Reading, wRiting, or ‘Rithmatic) + half of ALPHabet. | |
| 24 | … which this tiny bit represents? (4) |
| ATOM – and staying on the same alphabetic theme, A TO M gives 13 of the 26 letters! | |
This took about an hour spread over a day. All parsed but LOI SWEETHEART took a good while to sort out. I enjoyed it very much. Last week’s was beyond me. This was stretching but achievable.
No time for this, as I finished it over lunch. DNK WOMANS HOUR. LOI KNIT; took me forever to think of the right sort of jumper.. I never did figure out SWEETHEART; tricky clue. I didn’t/don’t get UTOPIAN (and shouldn’t ‘like’ be underlined?). I liked ‘setter free’ and ‘current shower’.
You’re right about the underlining, thanks. I don’t know why uplands should be utopian!
It seems you have to go to the OED to find a dictionary definition of “Sunlit Uplands”:
–An idealized or longed-for future time of happiness, prosperity, good fortune, etc. (Popularized by Winston Churchill in his “This was their finest hour” speech).
Although Collins doesn’t have a separate entry for the phrase, I notice that under both “Sunlit” and “Upland”, it appears several times in their “Example Sentences” section (cited from UK newspapers).
That must be why it was familiar to me – it’s commonly used in the media here.
Thanks. I just looked at my ODE, and none of their many corpus examples for ‘sunlit’ and ‘upland’ has ‘sunlit uplands’.
Interesting. This has led me to explore, and for AUD60 p.a. I can get the ODE on IPad, which includes the “sunlit uplands” reference. The first time I couldn’t find something elsewhere!
I really enjoyed this puzzle – very high quality! I could biff many of the clues, but it took a while to get the parsings. I put in and erased aisle several times before I thought of paisley – after trying to make paisley fit! And if you’ve got Woolf as an answer, there is only one possible Orlando!
Time: 59 minutes
I gave up for the night with 40 minutes on the clock and one answer missing. The following morning I wrote in SWEETHEART immediately on rereading the clue.
I looked twice at KNIT for the knitted garment, but vaguely remembered discussing it on a previous occasion and it was okay.
I didn’t get how the parsing of PRESS WAY worked, but sort of see it now.
For 2dn cue Flanders and Swann.
Thanks for the Flanders & Swann, Jack. Very amusing!
59m 44s but I put in GNAT iso KNIT in 12ac. I was focused on a jumper being some sort of small flea-like creature.
7d fell handily. An image of Tilda Swinton in the film ‘Orlando’ featured in The Times Daily Quiz only a day or two before this puzzle appeared.
In 26ac I didwonder if ‘debarking’ might have had something to do with dogs!
Thanks Bruce, especially for RALPH.
COD to 25ac: AMMETER (current shower, indeed!)
DNF, defeated by SWEETHEART.
Thanks branch and setter.
COD Woman’s Hour
LOI was SWEETHEART, the timer says I took 90 minutes but I have the feeling I left it running during a phone call, still it probably took me an hour or so, so not easy.
Excellent crossword, nothing to complain about (except a very MER for the use in 6dn of ‘curt’ to remove the last letter). It took me 53 minutes.
Probably just being thick, but what has sweetheart to do with duck?
Duck can be an affectionate way of addressing one’s beloved, or other half, particularly ‘up north’. I have to say I was fooled by this also, as I tend to think of ‘ducks’ rather than ‘duck’, so was looking in vain for the feathered variety.
oddly, speaking as one born in Brum, DUCK is a midlands term.
I found this very difficult, and in the end was defeated by S-E-T-E-R-. After using aids, I immediately realised I’d failed to consider that meaning of duck. Also took forever to get RALPH or to think of Paisley, even after AISLE was the obvious candidate. Also haven’t seen curt indicating a shortened word before, so that thoroughly discombobulated me. I wondered if this was one of our Sunday setters, as the whole thing had a bit of a Sunday feel to it.
Since I did this a week ago, I don’t really remember much about it. I see from loading up the grid that I was all correct and I took 54 minutes. At 23/24D I got ATOM and it unexpectedly turned out not to help with RALPH (since it was not something like NOTOZ), and it ended up being my LOI.
I liked this – nearly finished but didn’t manage to get sweetheart.
Can I be pedantic about your answer 8 down and your use of ETA’S – there is no apostrophe in plurals!
Thanks. Fair’s fair!