Times Cryptic No 28626 – Saturday, 10 June 2023. Wizard prang, wot?

21 comments on “Times Cryptic No 28626 – Saturday, 10 June 2023. Wizard prang, wot?”

1. 27m 50s
   Pretty straightforward with nothing really memorable except 5d reminded me very much of 21ac in #25886 on 08Sep14: “Weapon whose use may make a child’s pulse race (10)”
   A: Peashooter, of course!
   As for 22d BADER. I have read he was not well liked by his compatriots and treated his batman in Colditz very badly.
   Thanks. Bruce!
   PS….As it happens there is an article by Ben McIntyre in The Times today about BADER. It appears Bader was, indeed, an extremely unpleasant person

   1. I knew of Bader, maybe knew he lost his legs, knew nothing of his ugly side. I’m reminded of Thurber’s great story, “The Greatest Man in the World”.

      1. I don’t know that story. I must look it up.

   2. Thanks for the heads-up. I’d seen the film and heard he wasn’t very pleasant in real life, but nothing prepared me for that level of nastiness – particularly the way he treated his batman! A very insightful article, particularly the last sentence.

      1. Yes, indeed!

   3. Thanks for the steer; I’ve just gone to read it.

   4. Martin, it is quite true about Douglas Bader. My father met him and was not impressed.
      But as he said to me, if I have both my legs amputated, and recover, and badger my way back into flying and fighting for my country, and am shot down over enemy territory and imprisoned, i will try to behave better 🙂
      The sad fact is that Bader was not untypical, in his time. Guy Gibson, no better.
      Thank heavens for Leonard Cheshire 🙂

      1. 👍

2. 36:34 WOE
   I flung in STONE-BROKE (the US form) even while thinking ‘Don’t they say “stony” over there?’ and of course forgetting to go back and check. The enumeration of 23ac should have made it a gimme, but I didn’t remember the name until I got the U. I never did see the anagram in MISGOVERN. Biffed URSA MAJOR, LE FANU, RED GUARDS, SWEET PEA, parsed them post-submission. Jonson called Shakespeare “the swan of Avon’.

3. 47 minutes. I didn’t quite have to Reach for the Sky to solve this one, but pretty close to it. Never heard of MAMBO for ‘Priestess’ so had to rely on the wordplay and couldn’t work out the parsing of OUTBURST; even if I’d been blogging I still would have had to call for help. Having ‘pulse’ appear in the consecutive clues struck me as a bit odd. Favourite was the misleading surface and well-hidden anagram for MISGOVERN which was one of my last in.

   I remember seeing Douglas BADER ages ago in Pro Celebrity golf (Peter Alliss et al); he didn’t look too well at the time and I think must have died soon after. The Wikipedia article alludes to some of the points Martin has made. I then read yesterday’s (Friday 16/06) Times article by Ben Macintyre (thanks Martin) which is very thought-provoking and well worth a read.

   Thanks to Bruce and setter

   1. I recognized MAMBO once I got it, and I can’t think of how I could have unless it appeared here once.

   2. I think Ben Macintyre has written a book on Colditz in which he has put his comments on Bader.

   3. 👍

4. 37 minutes for all but 1dn on which I spectacularly failed. I couldn’t find a word to fit the checkers, couldn’t decide what the definition was supposed to be, and missed the anagram wordplay completely. Elsewhere I had struggled with the intersecting answers RED GUARDS and LE FANU who I’d heard of vaguely but had no idea that he was Irish.

5. Damn, I had STONE-BROKE too (and it never even crossed my mind, Kevin, that they say “stony” over there).
   I didn’t know of the English pilot but the name looked likely. (I thought, actually, of—sic—Bader-Meinhof, though that’s really Baader.)

6. I don’t do quick because I enjoy the first-cup-of-coffee-and-crossword ritual too much to want to rush it, but found this all slipped in quite easily until 1a, where I didn’t know the priestess so had no way of knowing, unless someone explains otherwise, if we were after Mambo(y), Mamso(n), Mamto(t) etc. I hit the same trouble with 23a where I didn’t know the currency or the author and plumped for De Fanu which sounded equally un-Irish. So it was an OWL for me. Still much to enjoy. PEASHOOTER made me smile as did UNDERWORLD.

   Thanks all.

7. I had to use aids for LOI 1D as, like Jackkt, I simply couldn’t see the word that would fit. It’s a very cleverly misleading clue and I completely failed to see the anagram. The rest of the puzzle was reasonably straightforward, though I was itching to put in NORMA for my FOI. Luckily, it was unparseable, and MOIST put me straight, though I had to struggle to remember the priestess meaning rather than the music. Chuffed to get THALAMUS from the cryptic, as I doubt I’d have remembered the term, and likewise LE FANU, whom I didn’t know was Irish.

8. I remember I struggled somewhat but enjoyed the challenge. BecAuse my paper came late, i solved online and see I entered BELT at 25d, so a DNF on one of the easier clues! FOI MOIST, LOI BELT, COD either PEASHOOTER or UNDERWORLD; I wondeed if the references in 6d and 18d to pea and pulse subconsciously helped the PDM in 5d..NHO MAMBO or LE FANU,. Thanks, setter and blogger.

9. DNF, defeated by the unknown LE FANU, which in turn stopped me getting RED GUARDS (could only think of ‘red shirts’, and would never have considered Edgar as a random man’s name). Didn’t get PEASHOOTER either, and SCINTILLA went in unparsed.

   COD Exposition

10. Never parsed 3d OUTBURST, cheated for 1a MAMBO (yes had seen these ladies in previous crosswords) and 23a LE FANU (NHO).
    COD 9a SCINTILLA, and wondered where Charybdis was lurking. Turns out she is deceased.

11. NHO MAMBO, only vaguely heard of LE FANU (nearly got there by following the cryptic, but looked too unlikely to be Irish!), and like others never saw the cleverly hidden definition in 1a. THALAMUS also escaped me. So all up not a brilliant effort, but not too unhappy with those I got- especially IDLE, PEASHOOTER, STONY BROKE and URSA MAJOR. COD OUTBURST.

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