TLS 833 (21st May)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Hmph! It’s hard enough without cock-ups in the enumeration, but this was one of the worst since I’ve been solving it. 10A was (4,5) not (9), 3D was (9) not (4,5) and 12A was (2,1,4) rather than (7). Actually it was one on the easier end of the scale apart from those and I had put at least 2/3 of it in before having to start looking things up.

Across
1 ALLEGE – quotation, from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Taken out of context really, as the sentence begin “Without adopting the pernicious maxim, that where much…”
4 CRESSIDA – CRESS + (Mount) IDA. Troilus’ lover in the Shakespeare play.
10 MONT BLANC – poem by Percy Shelley, full title Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni.
11 KAFKA – the clue hints at the titles of his three novels: The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).
12 TO A LADY – Epistle II in Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays (1735).
13 ASSYRIA – from Byron’s poem The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815):

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
14 GHENT – Joris is one of the three riders in Browning’s 1838 poem How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.
15 ENDYMION – 1818 poem by Keats and 1880 novel by Disraeli.
18 OPERETTA – Patience is one by Gilbert & Sullivan.
20 OUIDA – hidden in “you, I daresay”. Pen-name of Maria Louise Ramé (1839-1908), English novelist.
23 MANDALA – The Solid Mandala, 1966 novel by Patrick White.
25 HOSTAGE – The Hostage, 1958 play by Brendan Behan. Originally written in Irish as An Giall and translated into English by Behan himself.
26 ALONE – Titus Alone is the third novel in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.
27 ORATORIOS – (or a trio so)*
28 TEA PARTY – as given to Alice by the Mad Hatter.
29 VERNON – in Rob Roy, the character Diana Vernon is known as Die (rather than Di).

Down
1 ARMITAGE – MIT (German for with) inside A RAGE. Xanadu is a 1992 poetry collection by Simon Armitage.
2 LINEAGE – quotation.
3 GIBRALTAR – GIB (tomcat) + R + ALTAR. Philip Dennis wrote a couple of non-fiction books about Gibraltar, i.e. Gibraltar (Islands Series) (1985) and Gibraltar and Its People (1990).
4 RICHARD BACHMAN – an early pseudonym of Stephen King, one of whose books was Thinner (1984).
6 SIKES – the villain Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist.
7 INFERNO – INFER + NO. 1897 autobiographical novel by August Strindberg.
8 AVATAR – The Avatars, 1932 novel by AE (pseudonym of George William Russell). Tough one to dig out, that!
9 MARY WESTMACOTT – Agatha Christie also wrote romances under this pseudonym.
16 MOONSTONE – “Moon’s tone”. The Moonstone, 1868 novel by Wilkie Collins considered to be the first detective novel in the English language.
17 PATERSON – Andrew “Banjo” Paterson (1864-1941), Australian bush poet.
19 PANDORA – first woman in Greek mythology, and a name for an ancient three-stringed lute.
21 ITALIAN – Italian Prospect (1976), poetry collection by Anne Ridler.
22 UMLAUT – cryptic definition.
24 ARENA – hidden in “De la Mare, naturally”.

4 comments on “TLS 833 (21st May)”

  1. I perhaps wasn’t feeling at my best when I tackled this one, but I found it extremely tough – so much so that at the end of 30 minutes I still had 10 clues unsolved; and, what’s more, two of the answers I’d filled in turned out to be wrong! Since I’d correctly filled in 9 of the across answers at a first read-through, this was a disappointing result.

    Rather than look things up straight away, I came back later and had another go unaided, but after another 30 minutes or so I was still missing VERNON and RICHARD BACHMAN, and I still had ANODE for 26A, having assumed that that was the “terminal”. I picked off the first two easily enough (with William Freeman’s Dictionary of Fictional Characters helping me with VERNON), but it was ages before I finally abandoned ANODE (and kicked myself). It’s a long time since I read the Gormenghast trilogy – I must have been in my 20s – but I should have realised that it wasn’t Titus’s father who was referred to (the clue would have been “… Lord Sepulchrave”) but Titus himself.

    My other earlier wrong answer had been PANDORE for PANDORA, where I was pretty sure that the former was a stringed instrument but not at all sure about the latter, and I thought that the question mark might be an indication that the answer wasn’t quite the same as the “first woman” – though with hindsight that doesn’t seem at all convincing.

    1. We’ve obviously been brought up on different reading material! RICHARD BACHMAN and ALONE were two of the very first answers I put in, without any hesitation.
      1. You’re absolutely right about Stephen King / Richard Bachman: he simply isn’t on my reading list.

        Mervyn Peake is quite a different matter. I read the Gormenghast trilogy many years ago and enjoyed the books immensely, particularly Gormenghast itself. However, faced with “Terminal situation of Lord Groan”, I assumed that the clue somehow referred to the 76th Earl of Groan rather than the 77th, forgetting that the former is usually referred to as Lord Sepulchrave.

        This could be one of those cases where simply knowing the titles of the books would have been an advantage, since in that case ALONE is staring you in the face. But the combination of “terminal” in the clue and –O-E brought ANODE immediately to mind, and when UMLAUT confirmed the A, it looked a racing certainty. I could vaguely remember that owls were involved in Sepulchrave’s death, but spent far too long cudgelling my brains wondering how “an ode” came into it.

  2. I forgot to mention the confounded enumeration errors. MONT BLANC was once of the answers I got before my first half-hour was up, but it took me ages to spot GIBRALTAR, despite having realised that the wordplay made the 4-letter word look like GIBR or GIBK.

    After that, I thought of TO A LADY rather more quickly!

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