For once I didn’t make any daft mistakes, my two wrong answers being down to ignorance in the case of 25D (DEAN) and, arguably, unfairness on the part of the setter in the case of 11D (CAIUS MARCIUS). Where there is more than one possible solution to the definition part of a clue (see below), then the setter should use the wordplay to resolve any ambiguity, but this didn’t happen in the case of 11D. (The alternative would have been to recompose the puzzle so that the ambiguities were resolved by checked letters, which in this case could have been achieved simply by moving the clue to 3D.)
And now a bonus question of the sort that might appear in Round Britain Quiz:
How might you connect a well-known cartoon family with the answers to 13A (West writer gets mixed drink near Runyon’s Detroit = NATHANAEL) and 29A (Composer seen as mug after air attack = BLITZSTEIN)?
(solution given at the bottom of this blog entry – the works mentioned in the explanations of the clues provide hints)
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | LORD SCROOP – in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Lord Henry Scroop is involved in the Southampton Plot against the king, and is last seen being escorted off for execution (this is another name with variant spellings – the Oxford Shakespeare has him as Lord Scroop as against Project Gutenberg’s Lord Scroope, while the historical figure is (I believe) nowadays always spelled Lord Scrope – however, in this case the length and checked letters leave no doubt which version is required) |
| 6 | LIMB – the Child ballad The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington contains the lines: “She stept to him as red as any rose, / And took him by the bridle-ring: / ‘I pray you, kind sir, give me one penny, / To ease my weary limb.'” |
| 9 | ORIFLAMMES – the oriflamme was the ancient royal standard of France, whose fly (the free end) is split into several points, as you can see in this image |
| 10 | SHAW – the playwright is George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950); and the aircraftsman is T. E. Lawrence, who joined the Royal Tank Corps in 1923 as T. E. Shaw a few months after being forced out of the RAF as Aircraftsman Ross, but was eventually allowed to rejoin the RAF as Aircraftsman Shaw in 1925 |
| 12 | ABBA – a rhyme scheme, though not specifically an English one since (for example) Petrarch used it for the first two quatrains of his sonnets; the Swedish pop group whose name is formed from the initials of its members (Anni-Frid, Björn, Benny and Agnetha) |
| 13 | NATHANAEL – NATHAN (Detroit, a character in Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls) + (ALE)* (an indirect anagram – Shock! Horror!); Nathanael West (1903-40) is probably best remembered nowadays for his novel The Day of the Locust (1939) |
| 15 | THWAITES – WAIT in THE S; a character in J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister (1891) (I was relieved to get this from the wordplay, as I’m not at all sure I’d have guessed it correctly otherwise) |
| 16 | BUTLER – Samuel Butler wrote Erewhon which is an anagram of “nowhere” (not quite “nowhere” spelled backwards) |
| 18 | UHLANS – hidden in kitzbUHL ANSwer, give or take an accent (a word probably encountered more often in crosswords than in any other context) |
| 20 | DIOMEDES – in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida Diomedes is Troilus’ rival for the affections of Cressida |
| 23 | DECASTICH – a poem of 10 lines and thus a quatrain (4 lines) short of a sonnet’s 14 lines (I don’t know if there’s any special significance in the word “subsiding” in the clue) |
| 24 | RAFT – in 1947 Thor Heyerdahl sailed his raft Kon-Tiki from South America to Polynesia to demonstrate that it would have been possible for pre-Columbian peoples to cross the Pacific |
| 26 | REEF – The Reef (1912) is a novel by Edith Wharton |
| 27 | BRILLIANCE – an OED citation |
| 28 | GUNN – in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) Jim Hawkins discovers Ben Gunn who has been marooned on Treasure Island for three years and who longs for cheese (“many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly”); the reference to Wallace is of course to Gromit’s cheese-loving companion in Nick Park’s animated films rather than to Edgar Wallace or any other more literary figure |
| 29 | BLITZSTEIN – BLITZ + STEIN; Marc Blitzstein (1905-64) is probably most famous for his 1937 musical The Cradle will Rock directed by Orson Welles as part of the Federal Theater Project |
| Down | |
| 1 | LOOS – Anita Loos wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), but the song Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, which appears in the stage musical and film based on it, and which the clue perhaps refers to, was written by Jule Styne and Leo Robin (I’m guessing here – perhaps there’s a better explanation) |
| 2 | RAINBOW – RA IN BOW; D. H. Lawrence wrote The Rainbow (1915) |
| 3 | SALVATIONIST – Major Barbara in George Bernard Shaw’s play of that name is a major in the Salvation Army |
| 4 | ROMANCER – another OED citation |
| 5 | ODETTE – in Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913) Charles Swann falls in love with Odette de Crécy |
| 7 | ISHMAEL – the narrator of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851), whose famous opening line is “Call me Ishmael” |
| 8 | BOWDLERISM – the philosophy of Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) who cut what he considered the unsuitable bits from Shakepeare’s plays and replaced them with anodyne alternatives to produce The Family Shakespeare (1807) (he also published a “bowdlerised” version of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire even though the raciest bits of that are in any case left “in the decent obscurity of a dead language”) |
| 11 | CAIUS MARCIUS – the Roman general who is awarded the cognomen Coriolanus in the course of Shakespeare’s play of that name (this spelling is the one used in my Oxford Shakespeare (and in Project Gutenberg), but I see that the wikipedia entry for the play has him as CAIUS MARTIUS (apparently using the spelling from the 1623 folio), while his name in the history books is (I believe) usually given as GAIUS MARCIUS, and (to complete the set) the version I opted for from memory was GAIUS MARTIUS) |
| 14 | STRULDBRUG – one of the immortal inhabitants of the Kingdom of Luggnagg in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1735) |
| 17 | MICHELET – (CHILE)* in MET; Jules Michelet (1798-1874) was a French historian who wrote a 24-volume Histoire de la France and a 7-volume Histoire de la revolution française |
| 19 | LECTERN – a barely cryptic definition |
| 21 | DEFENCE – the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Defence (1930) is the chess grandmaster Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, the “board” of the clue being a chess board |
| 22 | MITRAL – the adjective from “mitre”, meaning a bishop’s headdress, though the word is more commonly found in the (mitre-shaped) “mitral valve” of the heart; Mrs J. H. Riddell wrote Mitre Court (1885) |
| 25 | DEAN – Saul Bellow wrote The Dean’s December (1982) (I’m ashamed to say that this title didn’t ring even the faintest bell – my best guess was LEON, though DEAN would probably have come second) |
Solution to the RBQ-type question
The well-known cartoon family is The Simpsons.
Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust contains a character called Homer Simpson whom Matt Groening sometimes claims as the source of the name of his principal character. (I know, I know – the answer to the clue “Matt Groening’s principal character (7)” is obviously SKINNER 🙂
In Tim Robbins’s film Cradle will Rock (based on the story of the production of The Cradle will Rock) Marc Blitzstein is played by Hank Azaria, who provides the voices of Moe, Apu and Chief Wiggum.
So I reckoned that LORD SCROPE must be the man after all, but spelled SCROOP (I think I’m right in saying that they’re pronounced the same way).