Solving time – approx 16 minutes, without aids! Quite a bit of guesswork was involved though, and I’m not 100% certain of 11ac even after subsequent research. A first for me, although I suspect Tony might have polished it off in under 10 minutes.
| Across |
| 1 |
HOMER – double definition, and off to a flyer… |
| 4 |
HIPPOLYTA – …as this went straight in too. Francis Flute is one of the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who perform the play Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. |
| 9 |
RAINBIRDS – a complete guess and one of the last ones I got. Turns out it was a 1968 novel by New Zealand author Janet Frame. |
| 10 |
SARAH – (a rash)*. Got the anagram. No idea who the naval officer was. |
| 11 |
DUELL – an archaic spelling of DUEL, I suspect. Much Googling suggests a link to James Howell as the probable source. |
| 12 |
IDEALISTS – IDEAS around LIST. Why “a leaning” though. Unnecessary to the surface reading, so clues the A twice. |
| 13 |
TOCSINS – “toxins”. Anyone got a suggestion for what the word “offstage” brings to this clue? |
| 15 |
SERVICE – double definition. A good friend introduced me to the work of Robert Service last year, as he’d camped by Lake Laberge, right where Sam McGee was cremated. |
| 18 |
SIMENON – (Some inn)*. Georges Simenon, writer of the Inspector Maigret books. |
| 20 |
PIONEER – The Pioneers, 1872 novel by R. M. Ballantyne, or an 1823 novel by James Fenimore Cooper. |
| 21 |
EYE-OPENER – I wonder if this was what Dickens had in mind? |
| 23 |
ELOGY – E(nerg)Y around LOG. I thought it might be an alternative spelling of “eulogy”, but apparently not. |
| 25 |
NAIVE – The Naive and Sentimental Lover, one of his lesser-known works I suspect. |
| 26 |
VINCENTIO – CENT I inside VINO. A character in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. |
| 27 |
THE FATHER – a play by August Strindberg. |
| 28 |
TOTEM – Low Man On a Totem Pole, a 1941 novel by H. Allen Smith. |
| Down |
| 1 |
HERODOTUS – Greek historian known as “The Father of History”. |
| 2 |
MAINE – must be right from the crossing letters, and there’s an American poet called Richard Eberhart, but he doesn’t seem to have any connection with Maine. |
| 3 |
REBELLION – The Rebellion of Young David is a short story by Canadian author Ernest Buckler. |
| 4 |
HERRIES – Rogue Herries, 1930 novel by Hugh Walpole. |
| 5 |
PASTELS – (staples)* |
| 6 |
OUSEL – quotation. Got it from checking letters, Project Gutenberg for confirmation. |
| 7 |
YORKSHIRE – Another one guessed from the checking letters. Much Googling has failed to find out who Bell is, and how he memorialized the eminences! |
| 8 |
ATHOS – double definition. One of the Three Musketeers and the Holy Mountain in Macedonia. |
| 14 |
CYMBELINE – (in my celeb)*. Pre-Roman English king. Shakespeare’s spelling of Cunobelinus. |
| 16 |
ROOSEVELT – (Verse tool)*. Another easy anagram. |
| 17 |
EARLY WORM – The Early Worm, 1927 novel by Robert Benchley. |
| 19 |
NINEVEH – Assyrian city destroyed by God in the Bible. I don’t know what the link with Tyre is though, other than that there was also a prophecy of its destruction. |
| 20 |
PARTNER – The Partner, 1997 novel by John Grisham. |
| 21 |
ERNST – Max Ernst, German artist whose name is the German word for “serious”. |
| 22 |
PRESA – (parse)*. A symbol like an X or an S surrounded by dots, used to indicate the points at which successive voice or instrumental parts enter a round, canon etc. |
| 24 |
OCTET – some simple maths – two quartets make an octet (at least in the basic meaning of “a set of four/eight”). |
I was wondering about TOCSIN, too. It rang all kinds of bells (sorry) in the area of “alarum off” and so on, and made me think of Shakespeare, though I can’t see any specific uses. Googling reveals a reference to an “offstage tocsin” in an academic monograph rejoicing in the title of “Shakespeare’s Sound Effects” (ah, the PHD thesis strikes again) which I’d have to pay to read. Like that’s going to happen.
Always good to see Service and Sam McGee getting a mention. I think my father can still be persuaded to recite the ballad after a glass of the good stuff. A second glass gets you the bawdy version.
Richard Eberhart wrote a collection of “Maine Poems”, having spent his summers there.
I’m thinking the “he” who memorialized the hills of Yorkshire would be Emily Brontë who published under the name Ellis Bell.
I would definitely emphasize that Mount Athos is in the Greek region of Macedonia, not the (Former Yugoslav) Republic of. Greeks get more than sufficiently upset that they’ve pinched the name without suggestions that they’ve nicked the Holy Mountain!
Despite starting off horribly slowly (having a senior moment with HIPPOLYTA and stupidly failing to get SIMENON as I worked through the acrosses for the first time), I had all the answers in place in 7-8 minutes. However, I then got cold feet over the NW corner, wondering in particular if DUELL might turn out to be DUELS (or even something different altogether), and wasted another 5 minutes checking that I hadn’t blown MAINE and/or RAINBIRDS and/or REBELLION, none of which I was completely sure of, so my “official” time was 12:26. At least it’s a relief to get one right!
In 10A SARAH is Sarah Woodruff, the protagonist of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles.
I suspect that the “eminences” in 7D are specifically “heights”, as in Wuthering Heights (I came to the same conclusion as sotira, that “Bell” refers to Emily Bronte).
19D probably refers to lines from Kipling’s Recessional: “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre”.
I don’t have chapter and verse for DUELL (I agree that James Howell seems the most likely candidate), and am not sure what “offstage” contributes to TOCSINS (other than a vague recollection of “tocsins and alarums off” as a stage direction in some Shakespeare play or other).
I’m another fan of Robert Service and have a copy of Songs of a Sourdough on my bookshelves.