Solving time: a little under 30 minutes (2 mistakes)
In fact my solving time might just as well have been “a little under 17 minutes (2 mistakes)” since I made no further progress with my last two clues, 27A and 22D, in the last 13 minutes. I’d made a rather tentative start, but then proceeded slowly but steadily until I was left with six clues that were going to need some guesswork: 1A, 1D, 2D and 4D in the NW corner, which I guessed correctly (I believe), plus my two failures in the SE corner, which I needed to look up – though with hindsight, I can’t understand how I failed to guess 22D.
As usual with the TLS puzzle, the clues were not exactly inspired, with some poor surface readings, but I almost always enjoy the challenge of having to search my memory (or simply guess) using what crossing letters I have available (some definite, some speculative).
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | PENTATEUCH – according to the 1898 edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (available online), the five books of Confucius (sometimes known as The Five Classics) were known as “The Chinese Pentateuch” (“The Pentateuch” being the first five books of the Old Testament), but this had been removed by the time of the 1970 Centenary Edition |
| 6 | OBIT – short for “obituary” |
| 9 | SAINT-SAENS – (as ten in SAS)*; the composer is Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). Although the SAS element makes this an indirect anagram, it’s a pretty obvious one. Another “in” would have been needed to avoid it (SA (as ten in)* S) – or a complete recast, which could have been used to improve the surface reading at the same time! |
| 10 | GARP – G(a R)P; the protagonist of John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp (1978) |
| 12 | TRISMEGISTUS – Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes) was the name the Neoplatonists gave to the Egyptian god Thoth (equivalent, more or less, to the Greek god Hermes), and later assigned to the author of various Neoplatonic writings |
| 15 | RETROACTS – RETRO (recreating the past) + ACTS (some of play), with a somewhat cryptic definition of the whole |
| 17 | TRACT – “tracked” |
| 18 | TYNAN – Curtains (1961) is a collection of reviews by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan |
| 19 | MARSEILLE – (Smile Lear)* |
| 20 | PROLEGOMENON – PRO + LEGO + ME (NO) N |
| 24 | IRIS – I think “pre-Murdoch” simply indicates that Iris comes before Murdoch in the name of the author Iris Murdoch (1919-99). Presumably “the world of communications” is that of Rupert Murdoch (the head of News Corporation and thus the ultimate owner of the TLS), but its only purpose seems to be to give some substance to “pre-Murdoch” |
| 25 | PASIGRAPHY – PA (IS reversed + GRAPH) Y, a system of ideographic writing, an example of which is Blissymbols invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897-1985) (I was vaguely aware of the word PASIGRAPHY, but had never heard of Bliss or his Blissymbols) |
| 26 | EDNA – (dean)*; Edna Ferber was the author of So Big (1924) which won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (I hadn’t heard of this work, but Edna Ferber was my first choice for “Edna”, with Edna O’Brien runner-up) |
| 27 | REPENTANCE – “Repentance is a tender sprite” is a quotation from William Wordsworth’s Peter Bell – A Tale (1819), a poem which I’ve never read, being somewhat put off by the opening lines of its prologue: “There’s something in a flying horse, / There’s something in a huge balloon; / …”. I remember an exam question based on another quotation from the same poem, ‘”A primrose by a river’s brim / A yellow primrose was to him / And it was nothing more.” What should it have been?’, but I think I gave it a miss. The use of the word pace (normally expressing disagreement courteously, or perhaps ironically) seems inappropriate here – I suspect it’s just coincidence that REPENTANCE is nearly an anagram of “tender” + “pace”. (I wasted far too much time trying to think of a suitable proper name for a sprite. Perhaps if I’d had the N from OPEN (see below), I might have guessed the real answer.) |
| Down | |
| 1 | POST – Post Office (1971) is a novel by Charles Bukowski |
| 2 | NAIN – the French word for a dwarf: I’d have had no problem with this clue if it had said “French artist brothers” since I’ve come across the Le Nain brothers, Louis (c. 1593-1648), Antoine (c. 1599-1648) and Mathieu (1607-67) in art history classes; however, I can’t think of any suitably named “French composer brothers” |
| 3 | AFTERNOON MEN – Afternoon Men (1931) is a novel by Anthony Powell (it’s one of the books on my “to read” list; A Dance to the Music of Time is a strong candidate for the “book” that would accompany me to my desert island, though that might be regarded as cheating since it’s actually a sequence of 12 novels) |
| 4 | EVANS – Joey Evans is the title character of the epistolary novel Pal Joey by John O’Hara (this was pure guesswork on my part as I’ve neither read the book nor seen the film starring Frank Sinatra) |
| 5 | CONFESSOR – Henry Havelock Ellis wrote My Confessional (1934), and Thomas Mann wrote The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954) |
| 7 | BEAST FABLE – (Fast be able)*; Jean de La Fontaine is best known for his Fables (1668, 1671) such as Le corbeau et le renard (The Crow and the Fox), which I remember having to translate from the French when at school |
| 8 | TYPESETTER – TYPE (kind) + SETTER (dog) (I expect I’ve seen similar clues for TYPESETTER in the past, but I don’t recall one quite as bald as this one) |
| 11 | LITTLE DORRIT – the brother of Dickens’s eponymous heroine was known as Tip |
| 13 | ARCTOPHILE – a lover of teddy-bears (easy to derive if you know some Greek): Christopher Robin’s was Pooh (in A.A. Milne’s children’s stories) and Sebastian Flyte’s was Aloysius (in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945)) |
| 14 | STENTORIAN – Stentor was a loud-voiced Greek herald during the Trojan War (as described in Homer’s Iliad), and the adjective is used to describe any loud, powerful voice |
| 16 | COMMONAGE – you can often google up quotations in the TLS crossword, but, when that fails, the best technique is to make a guess, look up the word in the (online) OED (easy for me as my local public library provides free access to its members) and search the citations |
| 21 | EMILE – Émile, or On Education (1762) is one of the few works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that you might come across in the daily Times cryptic, where you might also find the writer Émile Zola (and his novels Nana (1880) and Germinal (1884-5)) |
| 22 | OPEN – Stephen Crane wrote The Open Boat (1897) and Alfred Noyes wrote Open Boats (1917) (I hadn’t heard of either of these works, but I simply can’t understand how I failed to guess the answer as it looks so blindingly obvious now) |
| 23 | EYRE – EY(R)E; literature’s best-known governess is the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) |
Looking at the answers, there are very few that were actually outside my ken (PENTATEUCH and PASIGRAPHY definitely excepted – I’m working on ways to slip them into conversation down the pub) but I just couldn’t see what the clue was getting at. There’s definitely a wavelength to this TLS stuff that my dial hasn’t found yet, but I’ll stick with it.
I find that TLS puzzles call for the same technique I needed when I started doing the daily Times cryptic back in the 1960s, i.e. a mixture of self-confidence and guesswork. When (as happens all too often), I solve only a handful of clues at a first read-through, I have to convince myself that if I keep plugging away I really will probably solve most of the puzzle by the time the half-hour is up. But I still have difficulty sustaining that self-confidence right to the end of the puzzle, and often find that I’ve missed an obvious answer or made some stupid mistake (I’ll be reporting on one of those in puzzle 820 in a couple of weeks’ time).
So, nil desperandum. Have confidence, and hope for inspired guesses to fill in any answers you really don’t know.
It’s rather nice to have a genuine challenge. These days I never really doubt that I’ll finish even the hardest of the Times puzzles, whereas with the TLS… I really doubt I’ll ever complete one!
Unfortunately I can’t quite remember which ones I failed to get.. pasigraphy, commonage, tynan I think. Greatly cheered that nobody else seems to have managed 100% either, (if you see what I mean!) I seem not to have done too badly for a first attempt after all and will persevere for another week or two.
Good luck with the next few puzzles.