Times Cryptic No 28781 — Bravo!

Author   plusjeremyPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic

15:09. Every once in awhile, a puzzle comes along that is so good that you almost can’t believe somebody created it. Like a great piece of music you can listen to over and over again, or a gripping novel you can’t put down. For me, this was one of those puzzles. I would solve one clue and marvel at the witty wordplay — only to find the setter outdid themselves on the very next clue. All I can say is, bravo.

Across
1 Rush towards Rome? [It’s] warmer! (6)
FLEECE – FLEE CE (rush towards Rome)

Here Rome stands for “Roman Catholic Church”, as CE stands for “Church of England”.
4 British don’t have to fight — that need not be understood (5,3)
BLACK BOX – B (British) LACK (don’t have) BOX (to fight)

We refer to something as a black box if we only need to understand how to interface with it, rather than needing to understand how it works on the inside.
10 Signal folder [can provide] something enthralling (11)
SPELLBINDER – SPELL (signal) BINDER (folder)

As in “SPELL/signal doom”.
11 Pole, say, heading off, [finds] somewhere to go (3)
LAV – SLAV (Pole, say) without the first letter (heading off)
12 Driver [from] west — heading that way? (7)
WAGONER – W (west) A GONER (heading that way?)

To ‘go west’ means to die. Of course the surface is lovely here (and maybe even counts as a semi-&lit) because covered WAGONERs in the United States rode west.

I recall seeing a better version of this wordplay somewhere, which was something like “Six feet under, or heading that way? (4,3)”.
14 Description of sister we understand that’s universally unpopular? (7)
NUNLIKE – homophone of (we understand that’s) NONE LIKE (universally unpopular?)
15 Surprisingly, many falling in with parking issue regulation (6,8)
FAMILY PLANNING – anagram of (surprisingly) MANY FALLING IN + (with) P (parking)

Fantastic definition.
17 Versatile accessory, awfully swanky, misfires (5,4,5)
SWISS ARMY KNIFE – anagram of (awfully) SWANKY MISFIRES
21 Ex-prisoner [given] word of encouragement for keeping in trim (7)
PAROLEE – OLÉ (word of encouragement) in (for keeping in) PARE (trim)
22 Most lean on one, matchless all round (7)
BONIEST – ON + I (one) with BEST (matchless) all around
23 Such as refund returned periodically? (3)
DUE – every other letter of REFUND, reversed (returned periodically)

This is the noun form of DUE, as in “pay one’s dues”.
24 Drinking too much, perhaps, [and] sharing a bit? (11)
OVERLAPPING – OVER-LAPPING (drinking too much, perhaps)
26 Wrongly declare one’s piece of data in note (8)
MISSTATE – I’S (one’s) STAT (piece of data) in ME (note)
27 Handle number in retreat with minimum staff? (3-3)
ONE-MAN – NAME (handle) NO (number) reversed (in retreat)
Down
1 His few faults one loudly broaches? (8)
FISHWIFE – HIS FEW anagrammed (faults) with I (one) F (loudly = forte, in music) inside (broaches)

FISHWIFE is the referent of ‘one’ in this descriptive phrase. It’s a bit unfortunate that the clue also contains the pronoun ‘his’, because the clue could equally be referring to whoever ‘he’ is.
2 One who’s succeeded in broadcast once before (3)
ERE – homophone of (in broadcast) HEIR (one who’s succeeded)

ERE is a word for ‘before’ which is no longer used (hence ‘once’)
3 Officer, one refusing to fight on his own, left (7)
COLONEL – CO (one refusing to fight = conscientious objector) LONE (on his own) L (left)
5 Boy phoning, ringing no Scottish [or] Italian number (2,5,1,6)
LA DONNA È MOBILE – LAD (boy) ON MOBILE (phoning) around (ringing) NAE (no [in] Scottish)
6 It’s time unit [of] key personnel stood on two legs! (7)
CHRONON – C (key) HR (personnel) on (stood on) ON ON (two legs, in cricket)

This is the amount of time it takes for a photon to travel the diameter of an electron.
7 Maybe oligarch[’s] rage after charge for possessing island (11)
BILLIONAIRE – IRE (rage) after BILL (charge for) around (possessing) IONA (island)

I originally had BILL = ‘charge’ and “around” = ‘for possessing’. This nicer parsing was suggested by a mysterious text, possibly sent by the current Times Crossword champion.

Edit: The walrus was Paul.
8 Seen in Roman square, a once leading British female missionary (6)
XAVIER – A in (seen in) XVI (Roman square = 16) + ER (once leading British female)
9 Medical procedure welcome before finding work (3-11)
HIP-REPLACEMENT – HI (welcome) PRE (before) PLACEMENT (finding work)
13 Officers in reserve prepared retreats after fighting (4,7)
GAME WARDENS – GAME (prepared) + DENS (retreats) after WAR (fighting)

Fantastic definition. I didn’t quite know ‘reserve’ = ‘preserve’, but then I thought of ‘reservation’. I don’t think of GAME so much as ‘prepared’, but more ‘willing’.
16 Something fashionably labelled might have had this shape (8)
HEPTAGON – HEP TAG ON (something fashionably labelled might have had this)
18 Hit [and] stab in back (4-3)
SELL-OUT – SELL OUT (stab in back)

I was looking for a little more going on here, so this ended up being my last in.
19 What’s most important, [having] family doctor at home (7)
KINGPIN – KIN (family) GP (doctor) IN (at home)
20 Working practice of French secretary upset primates (6)
APEDOM – MO (working practice = modus operandi) + DE (of [in] French) + PA (secretary), all reversed (upset)
25 Doctrine generally somewhat clumsily recalled (3)
ISM – hidden in (somewhat) CLUMSILY reversed (recalled)

78 comments on “Times Cryptic No 28781 — Bravo!”

  1. I liked this one very much too. It was a good, meaty challenge—I had all but seven worked before breaking for my meal of the day (BLT on a crunchy croissant)—and I didn’t notice anything likely to raise a complaint from our usual crew (but we’ll see). My last ones, in order, were PAROLEE (which just shows how hungry I was before), APEDOM (which is a bit unusual, and gives me an opportunity to remind everyone that we are all part of the primate family), BLACK BOX (had BLACK before dinner), CHRONON (had all the crossers already!), XAVIER, FISHWIFE and (LOI, ta-da) FLEECE (sneaky definition; and why run to another religious denomination if you’re fed up with the C of E?!).

      1. The basic question could be put to any theist, no matter how distinguished (and preferably one among the living).

  2. No wonder I couldn’t parse Pentagon. The NE took a long time, with the double legs finally breaking my mental log jam and giving me a place to start. Thx, jeremy

  3. Fun crossword. I got LA DONNA E MOBILE from the Scottish no (NAE) and the enumeration. My LOI was FLEECE. There were some unusual (but not obscure) words like APEDOM and NUNLIKE that I’m sure I’ve never used in my life. I struggled in the NE where I had BLACK but wasn’t sure what the second word was, and I hadn’t a clue about the missionary. Then I clicked and got BOX and so XAVIER was then obvious and I saw how the clue worked. I’d been trying to remember the Latin for nine (so i was going in the right direction) and then when I realized it was “novem” I also realized that was never going to work.

  4. 36 minutes. Yes, very enjoyable though I couldn’t parse the CE bit of FLEECE and thought WAGONER was just a cryptic def. It’s probably the same way of looking at it, but I parsed FISHWIFE as an &lit – a cryptic def (as shown in the blog) and all the clue as wordplay. My COD.

    NUNLIKE was good but my first stab NUNS HIP was almost better!

    1. Sorry, my underlining was meant to indicate that this was an &lit. The definition is a descriptive phrase, and my explanation was just trying to say that ‘one’ refers to the FISHWIFE. I’ll try to say it better.

  5. Agree with the praise given for this very balanced offering. Sufficiently chewy for a Friday, and some very lovely structures Family Planning and Kingdom among others. Some unparsed so many thanks Jeremy for the explanations including for Xavier on which I must have spent 5 mins (despite attending St Francis Xavier’s cathedral in Adelaide in my youth). I couldn’t get beyond my initial thought that ‘seen in Roman’ might be ‘vidi’.

  6. 45 minutes of steady solving but the last 10-15 of these were spent in the NE corner where four clues (4,6,7 &8) baffled me for far too long.

    I managed to construct CHRONON eventually from wordplay, but I’d never heard of it and note it has never come up before today other than in a Monthly Special in 2020, but I never tackle them anyway. On reflection, since I had all the checkers in place and I know CHRONO refers to time (as in ‘chronometer’) I really shouldn’t have made such a meal of this.

    My problem at 4ac was that I couldn’t think what 3-letter word meaning ‘fight’ could come after BLACK to make something that doesn’t need to be understood. I eventually settled for BOX, but the only BLACK BOX I knew of is the aircraft flight recorder (which is not black but bright orange). The required meaning was a new one on me.

    I then saw BILLIONAIRE and reverse-engineered to find the wordplay. The X-checker at 8dn and wordplay then handed me XAVIER although I didn’t know anything about him.

    Quite a tough challenge, but very enjoyable.

    1. Chronon is an interesting measurement unit. I’d heard of it but didn’t know how long it was until a looked it up post-solve. The dictionary definition of “a unit of time equal to the time that a photon would take to traverse the diameter of an electron: about 10–24 seconds” is a bit dated as we are in the realms of quantum mechanics at these tiny distances and further theoretical advances have been made.

  7. Pleased to have all but three in 30 minutes. Excellent crossword. FLEECE, WAGONER , issue regulation and the FISHWIFE were my favourites.

  8. 30:00
    A fantastic puzzle. And done by Jeremy in a fantastic time. Look at the SNITCH: the only green personal NITCH in field of red and yellow.
    I biffed the aria from ‘Italian number’ and enumeration, and biffed the knife from A, M, K; parsed both, and other biffs (PAROLEE, BILLIONAIRE, XAVIER), post-submission. I didn’t get GAME, and still don’t: one can be game but not prepared, and prepared but not game. NHO CHRONON, but wotthehell. Lots of terrific clues, but maybe COD to FAMILY PLANNING for its definition.

    1. For GAME, Collins has “having enough spirit or enthusiasm; ready (for something),” emphasis added.

    3. Wavelength is really a thing. This was one of the easiest puzzles I’ve done in a long time (20-25 minutes is my average these days, and more like 30+ for a Friday) and I was shocked to see that it was actually something of a stinker. We all have our days, I guess!

  9. Yes it was clever, yes it was crafty, yes it was enjoyable but bloody hell it was hard. I can’t recall a harder puzzle in recent times and was delighted to actually finish the thing in 49.04. Hit a wall in the NE where NUNLIKE, CHRONON, XAVIER and BLACK BOX (and others, probably) had to be ground out one by one. Still don’t get how FLEECE works, don’t know that use of black box and needed Jeremy’s excellent blog to understand about half of this after the event. Like others I got the song quite early (I couldn’t tell you another one starting La D…) and that probably got me over the line.

    1. I didn’t understand CE either, until it finally sank in: if you flee the C of E, you might (like Newman) head to the RC.

    2. If you flee from the Church of England, you might be tempted to join (the Church of) Rome.

      2. We’ve had FLEECE before almost the same, I’m sure. Too tired to look… company Christmas party today so I’m 3 sheets to the wind. Also had NONCE / non-ce to clue Catholic priests, which led to some being not entirely gruntled.

  10. 70m 52s
    Pleased to finish this one. The NE corner was particularly tough.
    In these ‘woke’ days, I suggest 5d may well be left untranslated in much the same way as Mozart’s opera ‘Cosi fan tutte’….

  11. Qual piuma al vento
    Muta d’accento
    E di pensiero
    (All together now …)

    I vaguely remember Ken Dodd singing his version. “Woman is fickle, Give her a tickle, etc.”
    30 mins. I really liked it too, especially Fleece and Wagoner.
    Ta setter and PJ.

  12. DNF. I did see FLEECE, Newman leading me on amid the encircling gloom, but that’s where the next three quarters of an hour was spent before coming here to raise the white flag. I might have read Physics and played a lot of cricket but I have never heard of CHRONON. I was missing 21a, 26a and 20d also. I had entered NUNLIKE under sufferance as any true northerner would, come up with the Italian number from somewhere and remembered that we used to play St Francis Xavier in my grammar schooldays. COD to HEPTAGON. Thank you Jeremy and setter for the experience.

  13. 13:10. Good one. I started very slowly, with only a small handful to show for my first pass through the acrosses, and then I got quite bogged down in the NE at the end.
    I had to take on trust that there was a missionary called XAVIER.
    NUNLIKE isn’t much of a word but there aren’t many alternatives. NON-LIFE insurance, perhaps.

  14. 20:40
    Tremendous, though leading to quite a bit of biffing, especially down the right-hand side. I wrote XAVIER, BILLIONAIRE and PENTAGON in the margin before twigging. I was at school with a Francis X.
    LOI CHRONON – I didn’t get the “on two legs” until reading plusjeremy’s notes, assuming it was something to do with “on and on”.

  15. Certainly tough (27.26 for me) and certainly clever, and it certainly bamboozled me in places.
    I probably should have got ERE (LOI) quicker but I was looking at the wrong end for the homophone/wordplay: I didn’t find the “once” helpful because it’s not that old. CHRONON was a not known, and it had the sort of wordplay you can only unravel once you’ve got the word. BLACK BOX with that level three definition way less common, I suspect, than the flight recorder, but at least it wasn’t “a type of seismograph for measuring underground explosions” (BRB first definition). Lots to like, but at the risk of being lumped in with Guy’s “usual crew” there were bits that jarred, too.

    1. I had not heard of or did not remember chronon but thought the wordplay was ok having got ?hronon and deduced the random key knowing chrono… as in chronology.

      My wife was more upset about the cricketing reference and “twice in the same clue!”

    2. I didn’t mean a “usual crew” of kvetchers—sorry if I gave that impression—only the regular gang of commenters, of which I am one.

  16. 29:01
    Back on message after struggling to finish yesterday.
    I biffed a few without trying to parse them as I always feel under pressure when solving online with the seconds ticking away.
    The NE provided the sternest test, with the unknowns XAVIER and CHRONON going in from wordplay once the checkers were in place.
    I don’t think there is anything too obscure and it is fairly clued.
    Thanks to Jeremy for explaining the answers I biffed and thanks to the setter for the challenge.

  17. 32 minutes. I found the NE corner hard too, and made it doubly hard for myself by biffing MILLIONAIRE and LOO. Finally, didn’t understand my LOI XAVIER (which was the only word to fit the letters, having realised it was (S)LAV not LOO) till coming here. What a clue!
    Thanks setter and blogger. Amazing stuff.
    Steve

  18. 21:16. Great crossword! Bamboozled at the end thinking NUNLIKE had to start NON, being a homophone of nun. Doh! Needed to come here to see how the clever “Rush towards Rome” worked as I failed to parse that one. I liked WAGONER OVERLAPPING and FAMILY PLANNING best. Thanks Jeremy and setter.

  19. Cross with myself as I worked hard for an hour on this toughie, enjoying lots of it, it has to be said, but gave up finally on the VERY unknown CHRONON. Once I saw it, I kicked myself, as I should have worked it out, like Jack, from the wp. Just didn’t get the “two legs”. Bah!

    Otherwise great stuff. I really liked FAMILY PLANNING (issue regulation, brilliant) and SWISS ARMY KNIFE.

    Thanks plusJeremy and setter.

  20. 36 mins half of which spent in the NE. LOI XAVIER I thought of IV and IX but assumed that XVI would be too unlikely. NHO CHRONON, but sounds like it could be a thing.

  21. 54 minute DNF as one letter wrong, having spelt the scottish no as NAY, with the Italian number being a guess.

  22. Much here that, as has already been said, was brilliant. I took over an hour, and even that was using aids at the end, because although it went along smoothly enough I became utterly stuck at the NE corner. XAVIER I never knew was a missionary and was trying to recall a name that has just come to me, Gladys Aylward or something like that, CHRONON I’d never heard of, BLACK BOX defeated me. although perhaps it shouldn’t have — I had the first word but couldn’t see the second. I particularly liked the officers in reserve.

  23. 17:50, really interesting puzzle, and not easy to unravel (as per lots of others, a certain amount of reverse engineering was required for some of the more arcane words).

  24. No time, too many interruptions, but not fast! But then it’s a Friday. FLEECE was a parse too far for me with the RC/CE thing, though a write in with crossers. CHRONON came immediately, I know it from old but it was also mentioned in a TV prog only a few days back. Spent a long time on my LOIs BILLIONAIRE and NUNLIKE, mainly trying to think of historical potentates. COD must be LA DONNA E MOBILE followed closely by GAME WARDENS. Thanks Jeremy and setter.

  25. I would have understood NUNLIKE (‘none like’) to match ‘nonpareil’ or ‘nonesuch’, i.e. roughly the reverse of the intended meaning, so biffed it without parsing on the strength of the check button.

    In 2d broadcast=air is a third homophone, but that’s probably just a coincidence.

  26. Enjoyed that a lot. Very hard, but a big boozy lunch probably makes it harder – company Christmas party. Verlaine used to go out Thursday nights on the lash, and do (and blog) Friday’s crossword early AM with no troubles at all. Not me.
    All parseable, and only one NHO easily guessed in CHRONON. A maybe heard-of.
    Today’s was similarly hard but much more enjoyable than yesterday’s – no “well I suppose it has to be” clues.

  27. Everything has already been said!

    Hard puzzle, with some biffing, so thanks Jeremy for filling in the gaps, and congratulations on a magnificent time!

    29:51

  28. Haven’t seen anybody post that, for them, “nun” isn’t a homophone for “none”, so I’ll be the first perhaps.

    Not the greatest honour but since I was nowhere near completing this without help today it’ll have to do!

    Thanks for the educational blog Jeremy.

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