TLS 829 (16th April) – scraped home!

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time – about 2 weeks in the end! After about half an hour I had most of it solved without aids – 12A, 19D and the whole of the SW corner were all I needed. I looked at it several times with all the books and Internet at my disposal in the next couple of weeks, but couldn’t get a handle on any of them. I finally found inspiration last weekend and managed to finish it, but only because I knew I had to blog it, having already failed to finish 828.

Across
1 CHAPBOOK – the quotation from W. H. Auden goes “Geography’s about maps, history’s about chaps”. A chapman was a pedlar who specialised in distributing chapbooks, which were usually small pamphlets or folk literature popular in the 16th-19th century.
5 PENANG – quotation from the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze. A Penang-lawyer is defined in Chambers as “a walking-stick made from the stem of a prickly dwarf palm (Licuala acutifida); misapplied to a Malacca cane”.
9 LATITUDE – a sort of cryptic definition, I guess. Dava Sobel was the author of Longitude, which was about the watchmaker John Harrison. More of a hint than a proper cryptic clue.
10 THROWN – first letters of H(amlet) R(ehearsal) inside TOWN. Yuk!
12 APRIL – April Morning is the title of a 1961 novel by Howard Fast.
13 OPUSCULUM – (US locum up)*. Didn’t know the word, but easy enough to guess from the anagram fodder.
14 MISTRESS FORD – MISTRESS (schoolteacher) + FORD (crossing) – a character in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.
18 THE APPLE CART – play by GBS, ref. the phrase “to upset the apple cart”.
21 LANCASTER – pass! Guessed from crossing letters, no idea what it refers to, but it’s the only word that fits. [ It was Osbert Lancaster, who wrote “All Done From Memory” in 1963. I even looked him up on Wikipedia, but missed the book title, which is listed there. Thanks Tony. ]
23 THAIS – A inside THIS, a novel by Anatole France published in 1890.
24 TRIALS – I’m guessing that the clue’s referring to the Scottish religious reformer John Knox, but I could be wrong. Another one guessed from the crossing letters. [ Yep, I was wrong. It’s Ronald Knox, who wrote “Trials of a Translator”. Thanks again Tony. ]
25 DOCTOR NO – DOCTOR (falsify) + NO (negative). A Bond villain who needs NO introduction!
26 SOLENT – Wolf Solent is a 1929 novel by John Cowper Powys (who was distantly related to my ex-wife, apparently). The Solent is also a strait between the English mainland and the Isle of Wight. No problem for me, as I was born and bred in Southampton.
27 ESTRANGE – (Sargent)* with E stuck on to the front.

Down
1 COLMAN – George Colman the Younger (1762-1836) lived longer than his father George Colman the Elder (1732-1794). The son wrote the play The Heir at Law in 1808.
2 ACTORS – quotation from his 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
3 BOTTLE IMP – BOTTLE + 1 + MP. Title of a short story about a genie by Robert Louis Stevenson.
4 OLD MORTALITY – OLD (former) + MORTALITY (death), nickname of Scottish stonemason Robert Paterson, who was the inspiration for the novel by Sir Walter Scott.
6 ETHIC – first letters of Ever To Have Illicit Connotation.
7 APOLLYON – A + POLLY + ON. The History of Mr. Polly by H. G. Wells, and one of Satan’s alternative names.
8 GANYMEDE – (Mean, edgy)*. A Trojan prince in Greek mythology, who now lives on as a moon of Jupiter.
11 SUPERCARGOES – A supercargo is someone in charge of a ship’s cargo. John Masefield wrote the poem Cargoes in 1902:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

15 SCRUTATOR – title of the 3rd book in Ian Irvine’s The Well of Echoes quartet. A fantasy series, so a bit off the beaten track for the TLS.
16 STYLITES – cryptic definition – one of a group of ascetics who lived on top of pillars.
17 FERN HILL – FERN (bracken) + HILL (ridge). A poem by Dylan Thomas. H. H. Brackenridge was an 18th-century American judge, but that’s irrelevant.
19 WARREN – Robert Penn Warren, American author and poet, who published the collection Now and Then in 1979.
20 ASHORE – All Visitors Ashore, a novel by C. K. Stead. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but it just did!
22 ARLEN – (Learn)*. The Flying Dutchman was a 1939 novel by Michael Arlen.

One comment on “TLS 829 (16th April) – scraped home!”

  1. 30:00 (4 wrong – but should really have been all correct).

    It must be something about the SW corner, as I screwed it up yet again, despite having the two left-most down answers (STYLITES and FERN HILL) in place fairly early on. I stupidly put in SOLWAY for 26A (a clue that wouldn’t have been out of place in the daily Times cryptic in the old days), somehow imagining there was a SOLWAY strait, and completely forgetting Wolf Solent. (Doh!)

    Almost worse was 21A, where I thought of LANCASTER as a possibility; but because the A (from the anagram of LEARN) was already taken by SOLWAY and because I couldn’t think of any obvious writer called LANCASTER, I bunged in LINKLATER. What’s really galling is that just over a year ago, I went to see the exhibition Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster at the Wallace Collection, and I’m pretty sure that a copy of his book All Done from Memory (1963) was on display.

    I then bunged in LERNA for 22D (in the desperate hope that that was the Flying Dutchman’s name), and finally (even more desperately) TRIERS for 24A.

    I considered ARLEN and TRIALS along the way, so if only I’d thought a bit harder about S-L-N- for 26A, I could have been home and dry.

    I used to reckon that I had a butterfly mind (perhaps not a bad thing when it comes to solving crosswords!?), but – given my failure to think of Osbert Lancaster – it’s now a combination of that and a goldfish mind. (Deep sigh!)

    I hadn’t come across the Auden quotation for 1A. There’s a similar one, but much earlier and more famous, by Edmund Clerihew Bentley: “The art of Biography / Is different from Geography. / Geography is about maps, / But Biography is about Chaps”.

    The use of “questionable historicity” in 9A looks deliberate, but I can’t make anything of it.

    For 24A, Ronald Knox wrote The Trials of a Translator (1949). I thought this one was a bit obscure. The answer was obviously TRIALS (once I’d resolved my difficulties with the SW corner) but I only unearthed the title by guessing that the author was Ronald Knox and then googling him and “trials”.

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