Solving time: 24:43 (1 wrong)
Once again I was tantalisingly close to an all-correct solution, but failed at the tricky 23A. Since I knew the word ASTORETH but not ASTEROTH, I opted for the former on the principle of not inventing words unless truly desperate, but was disappointed to find on checking my answers that ASTEROTH is an alternative spelling of the familiarly devilish ASTAROTH, whereas ASTORETH is an alternative name for the goddess ASTARTE.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | SAPPHO – (HAS HOP)*; the 6th century BC Greek poet (I’m afraid my O level in Classical Greek didn’t take me as far as reading her poetry in the original) |
| 5 | FESTIVAL – Festival Nights (1984) is a collection of poems by Gavin Ewart |
| 9 | OEDIPUS REX – Psychiatrist: “Mrs Goldstein, I’m afraid your son is suffering from an Oedipus complex.” Mrs Goldstein: “Oedipus, schmoedipus – what does it matter so long as he loves his mother?” |
| 10 | WADE – “The History of A Self-Tormentor” is the account of herself that Miss Wade writes for Arthur Clennam in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (a book of which Mr Todd said “There are passages in [it] which I can never hear without the temptation to weep” – see 17D below – but which I’ve so far resisted the temptation to read myself) |
| 11 | LEOPARDI – LEOPARD + I; The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) (published posthumously in 1958) is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only novel; the poet is Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) |
| 12 | FINGER – John Braine wrote Finger of Fire (1977) |
| 13 | ISNT – It Isn’t This Time Of Year At All!: An Unpremeditated Autobiography (1954) is a memoir by the Irish author Oliver St John Gogarty |
| 15 | ANNALIST – ANNA + LIST; Anna Tellwright is the eponymous heroine of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns (1902) |
| 18 | PASSWORD – The Password (1952) is a collection of poems by James Reeves |
| 19 | MUSE – double definition |
| 21 | HOLTBY – HOLT + BY; the word “holt”, meaning a wood, is familiar to me from one of my favourite poems, A. E. Housman’s On Wenlock Edge: “‘Twould blow like this through holt and hanger”; the northern novelist is Winifred Holtby, best known for South Riding (1936) |
| 23 | ASTEROTH – RHEOSTAT*; Asteroth is an alternative spelling of the more usual Astaroth, one of the many names for devils of various kinds (I’m familiar with the spelling Astaroth from Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust, which I’ve performed a couple of times (once with Colin Davis conducting and once with Georg Solti), where the men’s voices sing “… Diff! diff! Astaroth! Diff! diff! Belzébuth! Belphégor! Astaroth! Méphisto! …”, and the spelling is usually the same in English, as in Dennis Wheatley’s To the Devil a Daughter, but I don’t remember coming across the spelling Asteroth before; on the other hand I had come across Astoreth, but had completely forgotten that it was an alternative name for Astarte (it’s obviously far too long since I read Paradise Lost!) |
| 25 | PERE – I assume this refers to Alexandre Dumas, père (1802-70), where the père is used to distinguish him from his son Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824-95); following this convention, Kingsley Amis (1922-95) is sometimes jokily referred to as Amis, père to distinguish him from his son (Martin) Amis, fils (born 1949) |
| 26 | APHRODISIA – “afro” + (IS AID)*; an ancient Greek festival in honour of the goddess Aphrodite |
| 27 | FACTOTUM – FACT + TO (rev.) + UM; a novel of 1975 by Charles Bukowski |
| 28 | GRETEL – hidden in “meaGRE TELevision spot”; Hansel and Gretel is one of the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales |
| Down | |
| 2 | ADELE – hidden in “reADE LEcture”; a novel of 1857 Julia Kavanagh |
| 3 | PHILPOTTS – “fill pots”; I’m not sure who the prolific writer referred to is, but I’ve an uneasy feeling it may be Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960) with two Ls |
| 4 | OEUVRE – the French for “(body of) work” |
| 5 | FERDINAND FATHOM – FERDINAND + FATHOM; Ferdinand is the name of various dukes of Calabria, particularly Ferdinand of Aragón (1488-1550) (a more literary Ferdinand would have been Miranda’s lover in Shakespeare’s The Tempest); The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) is a novel by Tobias Smollett (I’m not sure why the enumeration (9-6) includes a hyphen) |
| 6 | SIX OF ONE – a novel of 1977 by Rita Mae Brown |
| 7 | IRWIN – I + R + WIN; the Shaw referred to is Irwin Shaw (1913-84) who changed his surname from Shamforoff (I’d probably have solved this puzzle about 10 minutes faster if I hadn’t rashly assumed that the answer was ALIEN (A + LIEN), imagining an unfamiliar (even though successful) work by George Bernard Shaw – or perhaps T. E. Lawrence!?) |
| 8 | ADDRESSES – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) made his name as a lecturer, and his lectures included “addresses”, for example his Divinity School Address |
| 14 | SOAP OPERA – a straightforward mildly cryptic definition |
| 16 | LAMARTINE – A MART in LINE; the poet is Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) (I initially bunged in LAMALLINE, but fortunately thought of the correct answer before moving on to the next clue) |
| 17 | TONY LAST – in Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust (1934), Tony Last is held in an isolated village in the Brazilian jungle where he is forced to spend his days reading Dickens’s novels to Mr Todd |
| 20 | STRONG – the novelist intended by the setter is probably Leonard Strong (1896-1958) |
| 22 | THEFT – A Theft (1969) is a novel by Saul Bellow |
| 24 | TAINE – the French critic is Hippolyte Taine (1828-93); the science fiction writer is Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), who wrote books on mathematics under his own name and science fiction under the name John Taine |
(Jewish) Patient: I have this problem, Doctor.
Psych: Yes, what is it.
Patient: I keep waking up from strange dreams.
Psych: What happens in these dreams?
Patient: All sorts of things, but you always turn up in them and appear to be my mother.
Psych: That’s very interesting. What do you do when this happens?
Patient: I usually go downstairs and have a coffee and a slice of toast.
Psych: What, a growing boy like you, just the one slice of toast??