TLS 1143 by Broteas, Sept 23rd – the end of all our exploring

Author   sotiraPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
One of the joys of blogging a TLS puzzle is the time you get to spend researching clues that almost everyone else threw in with a shrug and a “Gotta be”. This week there were two of them, LANIGER and SCHOOLBOY, two clues likely to make you think of TS Eliot and having nothing at all to do with him. Broteas likes his herrings red.

My efforts to untangle the SCHOOLBOY clue were in vain. In fact, it was driving me nuts and ‘joy’ wasn’t the word springing to mind. I turned to our colleague Z8b8d8k for help and he put me on what we hope is the right track. But the time I spent on the wrong track wasn’t wasted. I had read the Four Quartets for the first time in years.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Which, on a good day, is how blogging a TLS puzzle goes.
Notes on selected clues

9a LANIGER – (EALING)*+R(adical)
Go to the top of the class if you knew Laniger was a character (more a cipher in a hypothetical rumination) in George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such

10a CORINTH
Cheeky! 4d is Corin, so 4th is CORIN+th

11a RU(RITA)N,IAN
The “educated lady” being, as it usually is in crosswordland, Rita from Willy Russell’s play

12a STEW(art) being art-less

14a HYDRA
The tail of one monster, (Mr) HYDE, being replaced by a Royal Acadamician (RA) to give us another

15a AGAMEMNON
Anagram of (NAME+M for Mark) inside the ancient Greek AGON

16a SCHOOLBOY
Well, it had to be, but why? Fellow blogger Z8 pointed me to Coker being the surname of two brothers in the Billy Bunter stories. So perhaps it’s just a case of two Cokers for the price of one found in the name East Coker. Or East might be a reference to Harry ‘Scud’ East, an older boy in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Best I can offer

18a bLOCKEr

25a ARAL SEA, which is shrinking as a result of Soviet era irrigation projects and hence ‘too dry’

1d SALAR THE SALMON
Shortened SALARy followed by ALMs (reduced donations) tucked inside THE SON. I read the other day that at one point the Italian government was testing salmon in the Po delta to demonstrate how clean the river was, conveniently failing to mention that salmon on their spawning run don’t feed and so are little affected by contaminants in the food chain. Crafty

4d CORIN, one of the Redgrave acting dynasty, now spanning five generations

7d LANGTON is Bennet Langton, close friend of Samuel Johnson and often mentioned in Boswell’s Life

8d THE WINTER’S TALE
Another red herring, the Greene here being not Graham but Robert, from whose 1588 Pandosto Shakespeare half-inched the plot. If you want Graham, see 23d

15d AMIBITIOSO Charade of AM,BIT,IO,SO and a character in The Revenger’s Tale, the work of Thomas Middleton or possibly Cyril Tourneur

17d HERBERT or “her Bert”, the lady’s man

19d CAMPS UP anagram of CAMUS+PP (pianissimo)

23d HALE is the ill-fated reporter in Greene’s Brighton Rock. “Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him…”

8 comments on “TLS 1143 by Broteas, Sept 23rd – the end of all our exploring”

  1. I’m pretty sure 16ac is simply that as you say, East and Coker are both schoolboys. The apparent reference to the Second Quartet being one of those herring things..

    1. I had no difficulty finding the Coker boys, but Google’s limitations (and not having paid proper attention to Thomas Hughes) meant my search for a schoolboy called East was futile. Makes much more sense of the clue’s syntax, though.
      1. I found “Scud” East by searching for likely sources of schoolboys (not a phrase to be bandied about these days), of which Tom Brown’s Schooldays was the first to spring to mind. I’ve never read it, but I have a vague memory of a television series of it in my childhood.
      2. I knew Scud East not from Tom Brown’s Schooldays but from Flashman, a much more entertaining read and far closer to the realities of Victorian Rugby, I strongly suspect.
        I share Flashman’s distaste for Hughes.
        George MacDonald Fraser’s books about Flashman are not just entertaining but historically as accurate as can be, through painstaking research .. highly recommended (for those of not too sensitive a disposition)
    2. That’s indeed all there is to it. One if those answers where you start wondering how on earth to clue it, then Google “Coker” with everything crossed, and realise that you have a way out that makes a niceIy deceptive clue. I read Tom Brown’s Schooldays a very long time ago, so remembered East. I think Sotira is right that there was a TV series, but I don’t think it’s a book they’ll adapt again.

      Broteas, on his last day of a Greek island holiday

  2. The joys of blogging indeed: I’m prompted to note that there were two other clues I hadn’t properly nailed down – SCHOOLBOY went in with a “what else?” shrug at the time. I had not sourced the Eliot poem, despite the plain sight “Such”, for LANIGER and have no idea now how I confidently put it in. HERBERT went in solely on the basis of being my favourite Metaphysical: I was so pleased to see him I ignored the simple cryptic her Bert. George Herbert’s “The Collar” is for me the perfect antidote for those days when you are struck by a profound and ferocious sense of why bother?. It’s also full of great wordplay, like much of his work: he’d have been a great crossword compiler.
    1. Ah, yes. You’ve reminded me of the trick of his Easter Wings. And The Collar was one of the ones that really stuck when studying the metaphysicals for A’level. The first lines of it still run through my head at times when I’m about sick of it all!
      1. Thanks to all for sorting that out. I never quite got round to it despite the fact that at the moment I’m taking the longest time I can on the puzzles and parsing fully as I go just to drown out the static from our appalling election.

        The only Redgrave I’ve seen live was Michael in Samson Agonistes when I was doing it for Alevel – and all I remember about the performance was that he kept flubbing his lines. Corin I always connect with the Scottish wedding in Four Weddings.

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