Solved in just over an hour. Quite a bit tougher than the previous couple of weeks – I only managed about two-thirds of it before running off to Google etc for enlightenment. Hardly any “straight cryptic” fillers, 4ac being the only one without some literary content, and a lot of quotations, only one of which I didn’t have to guess or look up (9D). Quite pleased to have finished it at all really.
| Across |
| 1 |
SHOSHA – by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I can’t find any evidence that it was his favourite, but it was set in Warsaw. |
| 4 |
IMPLORED – (I led prom)* |
| 10 |
ACHILLEUS – ACHILLES around U. A Roman emperor of Egypt. |
| 11 |
SIMON – Neil Simon, the American playwright, and Simon Pure, a character in the 18th-century play A Bold Stroke for a Wife by Susanna Centlivre. |
| 12 |
MOLOTOV – quotation. |
| 13 |
SESTINE – hidden in “palimpsest in Egyptian library.” An old verse form of six six-lined stanzas having the same end-words in different orders, and a triplet introducing all of them (from Chambers). |
| 14 |
PROUT – the house-master in Stalky & Co. The clue paraphrases a line from Chapter 3. |
| 15 |
EVERDENE – EVER + (need)*. Bathsheba Everdene is a character in Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. |
| 18 |
ABSENTEE – Lord Clonbrony is a character in The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth. |
| 20 |
SCENA – hidden in “coalesce naturally.” |
| 23 |
CECILIA – 1782 novel by Fanny Burney, subtitled Memoirs of an Heiress. |
| 25 |
LAERTES – (Real set)*. Ophelia’s brother in the play (and film). |
| 26 |
EQUUS – Latin for horse, and a play by Peter Shaffer. |
| 27 |
AUCTORIAL – (our Altaic)* |
| 28 |
THE HEART – ref. Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness
|
| 29 |
PASSES – Pippa Passes, a play by Robert Browning. |
| Down |
| 1 |
STAR MAPS – Two on a Tower is a novel by Thomas Hardy in which the main protagonist is an amateur astronomer. |
| 2 |
OTHELLO – O (love) + TO around HELL. |
| 3 |
HALF TITLE – I put this in reluctantly, as it appears to be a dreadful clue. Are we saying that BEDE is half of Venerable Bede, and LEAR half of King Lear? At least the second choice has the right number of letters, but I really hope I’ve missed something more sensible. [ Thanks Tony. I had forgotten about Adam Bede by George Eliot, so Lear and Bede are indeed both a HALF TITLE.]
|
| 5 |
MISS SNEVELLICI – Quotation, from Nicholas Nickleby. Stealing from Wikipedia, “The talented leading lady of the Crummles troupe. She and Nicholas flirt with romance, but nothing comes of it, and she eventually leaves the troupe to get married.” |
| 6 |
LUSTS – Title of a novel by this Canadian author, published in 1984. |
| 7 |
RAMPION – This is about Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, in which the character Mark Rampion is based on D. H. Lawrence. |
| 8 |
DANTES – double definition: Dante’s and (Edmond) Dantes, a.k.a. The Count of Monte Cristo. |
| 9 |
HEAVIER-THAN-AIR – quotation, helpfully with the name of the novel it comes from. Bit of a giveaway really. |
| 16 |
DESDEMONA – DEMON inside (Sade)*. 2D’s wife, who he ends up murdering after Iago convinces him she’s been unfaithful. |
| 17 |
RASSELAS – a short novel by Samuel Johnson. Rasselas is a prince who travels looking for the secret of a happy life, coming to the conclusion that there is no easy path to happiness. [ Thanks Tony again. The final chapter of this is entitled “The Conclusion, in which Nothing is Concluded”. ]
|
| 19 |
BECAUSE – Because the Night, a crime novel by James Ellroy. |
| 21 |
ENTRIES – quotation which I had to Google up. “Peter Pindar” is the nom-de-plume of John Wolcot, an 18th-century satirist. |
| 22 |
ACCENT – pretty lame cryptic definition. |
| 24 |
LISLE – Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, who wrote the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. |
I stupidly bunged in ROAD MAPS for 1D, imagining that the “tower” might have something to do with towing a car instead of realising that it was a direct reference to the Hardy novel (which I’d heard of but have never read); and that screwed up SHOSHA, which I hadn’t heard of so probably would have missed anyway. My other failures were MISS SNEVELLICI (it’s over 35 years since I read Nicholas Nickleby!) and ENTRIES, where I tossed up between that and ENTAILS and went for the latter (I didn’t think either sounded particularly likely).
I made a pretty good start, getting 16/30 answers right on the first pass (though LUSTS was a guess), with one wrong punt at CAMILLA (the title of another Fanny Burney novel) for 17A, but then slowed dramatically and had to search the back of my mind for some of the other answers, like PROUT (it’s a long time since I read Stalky & Co as well!) – but managed to remember or guess them all bar the four I’ve mentioned.
According to the wikipedia article on Shosha, “Aaron had many love affairs with women, but the only woman he truly loved was Shosha, his childhood friend”, which I suppose makes her a favourite (and Singer’s by virtue of his having written the book). OK, perhaps not very convincing.
In 3D, Bede is half of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, which makes it the right length after all.
I think the point of 17D is that the title of the final chapter of Rasselas is “The Conclusion, in which Nothing is Concluded”.
I did find a reference in a publisher’s note that says: “An international bestseller and Singer’s own favorite among his novels, ‘Shosha’ is a hauntingly lyrical love story set in Jewish Warsaw on the eve of its annihilation.”
Couldn’t resist looking up the references to check that Pippa Passes is indeed the Browning poem notorious for his spectacular misappropriation of a four-letter word. It is. But I hadn’t realised there’s a town in Kentucky named after the poem. Must invite a few jokes.
The main gap in the grid for me before reaching out to Google was in the NE corner. I can’t tell you how long I stared at 1d before finally going the same way as Tony with ‘Road maps’. Stalky and Co. is a gap in my reading that I doubt I’ll be filling, so that was a known unknown from the start.
Thanks, both, for the education on RASSELAS, which Icouldn’t get even with aids.