Solving time: 30:00
I used the whole 30 minutes for this puzzle because there were a number of answers I wasn’t completely sure about, but in the end all my first guesses turned out to be correct. At the moment, I’m finding the even-numbered puzzles significantly easier than the odd-numbered ones. (Touch wood!)
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | TUNIC – I in Tunc, Lawrence Durrell’s novel of 1968 (this took me far longer than it should have done, mainly because I didn’t think of “I” as equivalent to “me” ( though I suppose that may be normal for the TLS crossword) but also because (remembering my schoolboy Latin) I naturally translate tunc as “then” contrasted with nunc meaning “now” – though it can also mean “then” = “next”) |
| 4 | CHARLOTTE – E. B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web (1952) |
| 9 | ANDROMEDA – and + Rome + da; Charles Kingsley wrote Andromeda, and Other Poems (1858) |
| 10 | TREND – t + rend (I don’t know whether it’s “rend” (= “tear apart”) or “trend” (= “tendency”) that’s supposed to be “literary”, but I’m not sure that the word really applies to either) |
| 11 | EARWIG – a citation from the OED |
| 12 | ETHEREGE – E + there + eg (reversed); Sir George Etherege (c1635-92) |
| 14 | IN MEMORIAM – (Main memoir)*; In Memoriam A.H.H. (often shortened to In Memoriam) is Tennyson’s poem written in memory of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam who had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage in 1833 |
| 16 | HOUR – Harriet Martineau wrote The Hour and the Man (1840) |
| 19 | SARA – Sara Monday is one of the principal characters in Joyce Cary’s First Trilogy: Herself Surprised (1941), To be a Pilgrim (1942) and The Horse’s Mouth (1944) |
| 20 | THE DRESSER – Sir Ronald Harwood’s play of 1980 draws on his experiences as Sir Donald Wolfit’s dresser from 1953-8 (the day after this clue appeared, the Queen’s birthday honours included the award of a knighthood to Ronald Harwood) |
| 22 | PROCLAIM – another citation from the OED |
| 23 | BRUTAL – (I haven’t been able to verify this beyond one scrap thrown up by Google; however, it sounds entirely believable) |
| 26 | DROWN – Dr + own; Ross Macdonald wrote The Drowning Pool (1950) (I believe the author is normally spelled with a lower-case “d”; there is a Ross MacDonald with an upper-case “D”, but he’s a Canadian Olympic sailor) |
| 27 | HAMMURABI – Hamm (the protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) + URABI (hidden in angostURA BItters); Hammurabi ruled Babylon from 1792-50 BC (I pondered over URABI for a few seconds, trying to think what on earth it had to do with Angostura bitters, before light dawned; I don’t recall coming across this sort of wordplay before – it can hardly be said to have been done for the sake of the surface reading!) |
| 28 | APOCRYPHA – questionable works in general, but particularly the questionable books of the Bible (containing some of the best bits, like Judith slaying Holofernes – as portrayed by Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and many others 🙂 |
| 29 | TYPEE – type + E; Herman Melville wrote Typee (1846) |
| Â | |
| Down | |
| 1 | TRAGEDIES – (dire stage)* |
| 2 | NADIR – Dark Nadir (1999) is book 5 of Lisanne Norman’s Sholan Alliance series, in which book 4 is Razor’s Edge (1997) (Razor’s Edge is clearly a popular title for a novel, since it has also been used by Somerset Maugham (1944), Ivan Yefremov (1963), and Dale Brown and Jim DeFelice (2002)) |
| 3 | CHORIAMB – a straightforward definition with only the vaguest hint by way of wordplay |
| 4 | CREW – a quote from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (the “old tar” of the clue):
(the ghastliness arising from the fact that all the crew are dead except the ancient mariner himself) |
| 5 | AVANT-GARDE – (a VAT danger)* |
| 6 | LUTHER – John Osborne (the archetypal angry young man) wrote the play Luther (1961) exploring aspects of the life of Martin Luther |
| 7 | THE HEROES – Charles Kingsley wrote The Heroes (1856) (I wonder whether children still read this book nowadays – it was my first encounter with Greek mythology) |
| 8 | EDDIE – Eddie and May are the two lovers in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (1983) |
| 13 | ARCHBISHOP – Willa Cather wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) |
| 15 | MARCO POLO – mar + co + polo; the Venetian merchant famous for his travels in Asia |
| 17 | RURAL RIDE – the clue refers to William Cobbett’s Rural Rides |
| 18 | PERRAULT – (apt ruler)*; Charles Perrault wrote the collection of fairy tales Contes de ma mère l’oye (1697) |
| 21 | ELINOR – hidden in “michELIN OR good food guide”; ELENOR (sic) is a character in Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) where she marries Ferdinand; but she makes a brief appearance as ELINOR when the couple reappear in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) as Mr and Mrs Grieve, Ferdinand now a reformed character working as a country doctor |
| 22 | PADUA – a straightforward quotation from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio says: “I come to wive it wealthily in Padua; / If wealthily then happily in Padua” |
| 24 | TRAMP – W. H. Davies wrote The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) |
| 25 | EMMA – the title of an unfinished novel by Charlotte Brontë as well as of the better-known one by Jane Austen, in which the title character is Miss Woodhouse |
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