Time: 25:21, so a challenging piece as far as I’m concerned, though full of delights and flashes of sudden realisation. I’d like to say, as a proper blogger, that I worked everything out as I went through. I’ll let Sir Humphrey comment on the accuracy of that.
This was my first experience of using the excellent new blog creator, which works seamlessly with less faff than the old version. We are blessed with people who know what they’re doing when messing about with computerese!
My habit is to show definitions underlined in italics, and to let the rest try to explain itself.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Excellent bishop that’s retired put to work since (7) |
| BECAUSE – Excellent is ACE, add B[ishop] and reverse the ensemble, then add put to work: USE | |
| 5 | Find Charlie back before Henry has left (4,2) |
| COME BY – I think this is C[harlie] plus HOME BY, which you expect your children to be “back before”, with the initial H for Henry deleted. | |
| 8 | Try to get shiny gem with discount? (3) |
| RUB – Select RUBY as your gem, and knock off the 25% as a discount. (Remove the Y!) | |
| 9 | Small quantity of ink left in well (10) |
| SPRINKLING – Don’t waste time thinking of a synonym for INK. Just put it in a SPRING or well after supplementing it with an L[eft] | |
| 11 | Fine pointer that’s showing north west (6) |
| NARROW – So much time lost trying to make FARROW work, but it’s ARROW for pointer with N[orth] placed at its west end. | |
| 12 | Fail to find gallery, say in error (8) |
| MISSTATE – An easy one: MISS for fail to find and TATE the inevitable gallery. | |
| 14 | Spying device in place across area revealing behaviour (9) |
| SATELLITE – Post submission solve: SITE for place is positioned round A[rea] plus TELL for revealing behaviour, such as Le Chiffre consistently placing his left hand on his wounded eye when bluffing in Casino Royal. | |
| 15 | Beautifully cut patch with a hole in it? (5) |
| GREEN – Just a CD. Reference golf (of) course. | |
| 16 | Nifty pseudonym such as Dr Dre? (5) |
| RAPID – Dr Dre is Andre Young, a rapper formerly with N.W.A. a combo which featured gangsta rap with explicit and violent lyrics. As such his the pseudonym is his RAP I.D. For me, a rarer meaning of nifty. | |
| 18 | Publican’s offering class A drugs to Spooner (5,4) |
| GUEST BEER – Pubs specialising in real ale will offer, as well as theiir usual beverages, such a temporary delight. Spooner would misrepresent it as BEST GEAR, loosely translated as class A drugs | |
| 20 | Confused at lingo on one engraved stone (8) |
| INTAGLIO – An anagram (confused) of AT LINGO plus I (one) | |
| 22 | Picture frames likely to burn, touching light (6) |
| PHOTIC – Touching meaning concerning, or about. Picture is just PIC, providing a frame for HOT, likely to burn. | |
| 24 | Celebrity on principle is most demanding type (10) |
| MAXIMALIST – The A-LIST is the elite group of celebrities, and it’s a bit of a push to match celebrity to ALIST, but the intention is clear. Tack it onto MAXIM for principle. | |
| 25 | A lack of finale for sluggish drama (3) |
| NOH – Japanese theatre, as if you didn’t know. So we have NO [sluggis]H | |
| 26 | Thin male bore (6) |
| MEAGRE – M[ale] plus EAGRE, a rising tide such as the one that surges up the Severn estuary. | |
| 27 | Side with props providing little support in drained fountain (7) |
| FIFTEEN – That’s a Rugby Union side, props being front row member of the scrum. Providing is IF, a little support TEE, enclosed in F[ountai]N minus its contents | |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | Live Wagnerian opera’s characteristic cold sound (6,6) |
| BERING STRAIT – Sound as in a stretch of sea, in this case between Alaska and Siberia. Live is BE, Wagner’s (series of) opera(s) the RING (include the ‘S) and characteristic is TRAIT. Assemble and respace. | |
| 2 | Show taxi ranks combined over the radio? (7) |
| CABARET – Aural wordplay of CAB ARRAY, taxi ranks. | |
| 3 | Doctor beginning to puncture delusion, as nice as it was (9) |
| UNSPOILED – An anagram (doctor) of P[uncture] and DELUSION. | |
| 4 | Make the sound of an eagle (4) |
| EARN – An alternative for eagle is ERNE. More aural wordplay. | |
| 5 | Clubs the right place for goalscorers, left-winger thought (10) |
| CONSIDERED – C[lubs] plus the position goalscorers have to be in if VAR is going to allow their effort, which is ONSIDE. Add RED for left-winger, unless you’re American, in which case it would be a Republican. | |
| 6 | Look pleased putting second last number on the clock (5) |
| MILES – The clock in this instance the mileometer in a vehicle. Look pleased: SMILE, put the S[econd] last. | |
| 7 | This put a stop to wound leaking in the morning? (7) |
| BANDAGE – This took some working out, though I think it works as an &lit. Put a stop to is BAN, wound leads you to DAMAGE, from which you “leak” the AM, morning. | |
| 10 | Composer associated with Hallelujah once, Handel or other? (7,5) |
| LEONARD COHEN – His song came to greater notice when it featured in the original Shrek. Here it’s an anagram (other) of ONCE HANDEL OR, courteously reminding us of the version in Handel’s Messiah. | |
| 13 | Walk to church, perhaps large building full of ghastly silver (10) |
| PILGRIMAGE – The large building is a PILE. Insert GRIM AG for ghastly silver. | |
| 15 | Contrive to lose snap? (3,4,2) |
| GET SHOT OF – I’ll call this a double definition. | |
| 17 | Recipe that expressly includes particular intolerance (3,4) |
| PET HATE – It’s taken me until now to realise this is extremely well hidden, in reciPE THAT Expressly. I couldn’t understand how to find PEE… | |
| 19 | Easy compact net’s middle and sides given alternating pattern (7) |
| ENTENTE – The middle of net is E, the sides NT. Alternate the two objects. Clever – don’t think I’ve seen this conceit before. | |
| 21 | One wears medal about to be sold at auction (5) |
| GOING – I (one) has GONG for medal enrobing it. The auctioneer’s familiar “going, going, gone”. | |
| 23 | Attack retreating force showing little fight (4) |
| TIFF – An attack is a FIT. Reverse it and add F[orce] | |
DNF
Never got GREEN or ENTENTE. DNK ‘gear’, but finally recalled GUEST BEER and made the correct inference. NHO ‘nifty’=RAPID, but as they say, it had to be. Demi-biffed 1d: got the BERING, biffed the STRAIT. Biffed BANDAGE. COD to ENTENTE, now that I understand it.
1:35:34 (no, it’s not a Friday), the very slow time compounded by a Freudian slip in tapping the “Submit without leaderboard” button. It’s not saying much but at least I would have come in at just under an hour had it not been for ENTENTE for which I had trouble identifying the def and working out the never before seen wordplay device. I couldn’t parse BANDAGE and there were other difficult ones including the ‘touching light’ def for the uncommon PHOTIC and the just remembered GUEST BEER. I liked the ‘Live Wagnerian opera’s characteristic cold sound’ for BERING STRAIT.
It would be nice to think that having had two tough ones on the trot, our editor has a nice gentle one in store for us tomorrow, but probably not!
Thanks to Z (I liked the Yes, Prime Minister clip) and setter
Tough one, this. Quite a lot of idiomatic expressions, which I enjoyed. Thanks to Zed for the parsing of NOH and BANDAGE, which I missed during my speed solve of 40-odd minutes.
80% done.
Some great clues here.
Tried MINIMALIST, trying to make minim=principle. But got the tough corner of PHOTIC/NOH/ENTENTE
The wrong ERNE made SPRINKLING impossible, a mistake I make way to often.
The Spooner clue was hard today, I didn’t know gear=drugs.
Missed PILGRIMAGE because I thought that “ghastly silver” would be an anagram of “silver”, and I had a couple of “I”s in there.
RAPID was genius, I thought Dr Dre meant an anagram of DRE
COD LEONARD COHEN
My trivia on the BERING STRAIT is that readers of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia would have been surprised to find an extra long article on the BERING STRAIT. This is because censors had instructed librarians to cut out the pages on Lavrentiy Beria(notorious head of the Soviet secret police) who had just been executed and paste in new pages with an expanded section about the Bering Strait to fill the gap.
COD = Satellite, of course
DNF but an excellent crossword. Thanks setter and Z.
47 minutes with BANDAGE, NOH and ENTENTE biffed. RAPID was only half constructed. Has Dr Dre also found the secret chord that pleased the Lord, which I thought was the minimum requirement to get into The Times crossword? Fortunately, he was an answer on Pointless last night. I checked him out and he’s only sixty years old so really a bit young for inclusion otherwise. I solved this more by good luck than good judgement. Thank you Z and setter.
That rule was discontinued some time ago. There was a discussion about it at the championship this year: the view they took was that the rule was a barrier to encouraging younger solvers to take up cryptic crosswords.
He died in 2016.
I was referring to Dr Dre, who is according to Wiki still alive and kicking. Leonard Cohen, an artist I know well, indeed found it was closing time in 2016.
What am I missing with ‘GET SHOT OF’ = snap?
“Take a photograph of”.
Thank you. Of course it is – but that would have killed me all day without your help.
Me too
#Me too!
DNF with 2 errors, 1 just a typo in CABERAT (how?) but 1 total guess with CAPITALIST which I now see was very gettable. .
Started off like gangbusters with BERING STRAIT wondering why the average was so high. LOI EARN after 5 mins of trawling.
45 mins of high quality stuff, all fair and entertaining. Thanks Zabadak and setter.
13:18. Nice chewy one.
Nice to see Dre appear. A rapper of course but also an extraordinarily successful producer who launched the careers of numerous famous artists. With a sideline in headphones.
Pedant’s corner: I wouldn’t call 15dn a DD because GET SHOT OF is not a recognised term for ‘take a photograph of’, so it counts as cryptic.
Get shot of. Fair enough, but it was close enough in my thinking to a non-cryptic phrase in common use, especially with “a” assumed.
Yes it’s a fine – dare I say pedantic! – distinction. But you’ll only find one of the meanings in a dictionary.
I always agonise whether to say get shut of or get shot of. In my football days it was the former, abbreviated to ‘get shut’, an exhortation to central defenders not to linger on the ball too long..
Collins has both. I’ve never come across ‘get shut of’ before.
21’34”, LOI MISSTATE, which I thought too obvious.
Held up for ages by false FOI, ‘cut’ instead of RUB. It works if you include ‘gem’ in z’s definition, cut = discount.
I was privileged to see Leonard in concert in 2008, having listened to his first album in 1968.
Thanks z and setter.
35:51 but confess to not understanding ENTENTE (wasted a few minutes as my LOI trying to), BANDAGE or that meaning of ‘sound’. So cheers for the blog.
Like the blogger I had FARROW for a while but even my wildest imagination could not link that to North West.
A rare spooner for COD for GUEST BEER
Quite enjoyed this one
Thanks blogger and setter
Found this a toughie, and was annoyed by 1d. Pedant that I am, Wagner’s Ring is not AN opera, but three with a prelude (four if you must), hence the apostrophe in “opera’s” should have been at the end of the word.
RIGHT!
That was tough. DNF. I gave up on ENTENTE and NO. Well I guessed wrong – plus one typo. All the rest done in just over 30 mins.
Some great clues. Favourite two were BANDAGE and GUEST BEER.
Thanks to our blogger and setter.
DNF. Competely off the setter’s wavelength – didn’t even get MISSTATE. A sleepless night didn’t help.
Some excellent cluing throughout. I particularly liked GET SHOT OF and GREEN.
Thanks to Zabadak and the setter
From EARN to ENTENTE in 35:59 with a lot of grinding of mental gears in between. SE gave most trouble. Missed the anagram for Laughing Len but knew the song. Didn’t quite parse ENTENTE, but had an inkling of what was going on. Didn’t parse BANDAGE either. Thanks setter and Z.
Several I entered without really understanding what was going on, and they were confirmed by the check button, not wise since their explanations, as I discovered here, were pretty simple, although 5ac was difficult. And I’d only vaguely heard of Dr Dre, so explaining that one was beyond me. Now I’m told, very good. Nice hidden, which held me up for a long time. Talking of long times, 71 minutes. But no complaints: a good crossword I thought.
39:04, with a grind at the end to get the last two: dredging up a word for ‘principle’ that fitted _A_I_ was a slightly exasperating tip-of-the-tongue experience, but ENTENTE was very satisfying to piece together. E_T_N_E was odd to look at, as it felt as if there should at least be a couple of words that would fit in those oh-so-common letters. Nothing materialised, understandably, as the Chambers app tells me the only other possibility is an obsolete EXTENSE (ie extensive). Thanks setter and Z for the entertainment.
Shouldn’t the definition of PILGRIMAGE be “walk to church perhaps”?
I think it works either way, though I’ll concede (perhaps!) with a preference for your suggestion. I’ll leave it for now as is, and see if others weigh in.
33:25
For a Snitch of 133 (my target would be 51.5 mins), this went pretty well. Missed some bits though on the way to completion:
NARROW – wasn’t entirely sure what ‘west’ was doing – just about works for me
INTAGLIO – this word came up recently so was in my mind when working from just the I checker
MAXIMALIST – LOI, not sure I would have equated the word with its definition without the wordplay
CABARET – didn’t think of ARRAY homophone
GET SHOT OF – Didn’t get the ‘snap’ definition until I came here – doh!
BANDAGE – beat me all ends up here – needed all the checkers to have confidence in the answer, but totally failed to parse
CODs to BERING STRAIT and LEONARD COHEN
Thanks Z and setter
Me too – off setter’s wavelength. Took a whole hour.
Didn’t like GET SHOT OF, or GREEN. LoI EARN, FOI SPRINKLING. COD LEONARD COHEN.
Thanks to Z and setter.
Two goes needed.
– Didn’t parse COME BY, which I eventually thought of having rejected COME TO, COME ON and COME UP
– Couldn’t have told you what INTAGLIO or PHOTIC mean
– Didn’t parse BANDAGE
– Still a bit baffled by ENTENTE… I understand how we get the first three letters, but how exactly do you get the rest of it?
Thanks Zabadak and setter.
FOI Leonard Cohen
LOI Entente
COD Unspoiled
The key is that the letters E and NT alternate through the answer: E NT E NT E. Clever stuff, but there can’t be many words you can do that with!
51:25 – I found this very hard but just about doable. COD goes to RAPID closely followed by the amazingly well hidden PET HATE. Some very challenging wordplay indeed – BANDAGE was particularly hard to parse for some reason.
9:02. Liked this. Gave up trying to parse BANDAGE.
Foiled by 5a- ‘back before’ as the equivalent of ‘home by’ is a bit of a stretch out of context .
So much for my efforts to weave Chaplin into the answer.
27 mins – the crossers bailed me out for a couple where I couldn’t think of the definition and was too mentally arthritic to see how the cryptic worked. A great and taxing puzzle with plenty of misdirection.
Did anyone else parse ‘ranks combined over the radio’ in 2dn cabaret as Royal Artillery or the combined letters R.A? maybe just me and a Pavlovian response to ranks being to search for military abbreviations. Not sure if ‘cab R.A.’ works any better than the ‘cab array’ but it’s what I thought of.
Really enjoyed this- but after an hour or so couldn’t fathom 16a or 17d. Never heard of Dr Dre (& don’t really want to) and didn’t spot the hidden at 17d. So I very lightly inked in “nut case” and crossed my fingers. Doh!
All correct, but not really on the wavelength. Very enjoyable and all fair though. I failed to parse bandage and come by, but very impressed by both when explained. COD to green as it made me smile.
15 minutes, would have been quicker if I didn’t make myself parse everything before entry. ENTENTE and BANDAGE were particularly tricky, COD to the latter once the penny dropped.