About two-thirds of it filled in before I had to start looking things up, but even though I completed it easily enough there are 4 or 5 answers put in without full (or any) understanding. In that respect probably the toughest one to date.
| Across |
| 1 |
AULIS – hidden in “Gaul is setting”. Refers to Barry Unsworth’s The Songs of the Kings, where the Greek fleet assembles at Aulis before attacking Troy in a modern retelling of the Iliad. |
| 4 |
BIONDELLO – (bloodline)*. A character in The Taming of the Shrew. |
| 9 |
SACKVILLE – SACK, VILLE. My first thought was Vita Sackville-West, but Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) was also a poet and doesn’t have the double-barrelled name. |
| 10 |
NIVEN – Larry Niven, author of the science fiction classic Ringworld. |
| 11 |
HEYER – only one novelist called Georgette as far as I know. I don’t quite understand the cryptic definition though. Is it just indicating that she wrote detective fiction? |
| 12 |
DRAYHORSE – from the poem Felix Randal by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The last verse reads:
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
|
| 13 |
LACKING – LAC (French for lake, or mere) + KING (novelist, Stephen will do as I’m reading one of his at the moment). |
| 15 |
RANSOME – RAN, SOME. Arthur Ransome, who wrote the Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books. |
| 18 |
SALANIO – (no alias)*. Another minor Shakespearean character, this time from The Merchant of Venice. |
| 20 |
TORELLI – Felice (the name means happy), brother of composer Giuseppe Torelli. |
| 21 |
PHILASTER – 1620 play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In the play, Philaster is saved from execution when his page Bellario turns out to be a girl in disguise. |
| 23 |
AGENT – (get an)*. e.g. Harry Palmer, although he was anonymous in the books. |
| 25 |
NIOBE – N.I., O.B.E. A daughter of Tantalus in Greek mythology who carried on weeping for her children after she was turned to stone. |
| 26 |
PARKINSON – Cyril Northcote Parkinson, naval historian and author who’s best remembered for the Law he formulated: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. |
| 27 |
CATHARSIS – (archaists)* |
| 28 |
ELLIE – in The Water-Babies, Tom starts off as a sweep. Ellie is a little girl who becomes his playmate, and they’re reunited at the end. |
| Down |
| 1 |
AESCHYLUS – Prometheus is the hero. Bound by Aeschylus, Unbound by Shelley. |
| 2 |
LUCKY – Jim Dixon is the eponymous hero of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. |
| 3 |
SOVEREIGN – got this from the crossing letters. My best guess is that the clue refers to Thomas Fuller (1608-61). |
| 4 |
BULLDOG – double definition. Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, hero of the books by Sapper. Also a word for a proctor’s attendant at Oxford. |
| 5 |
OPEN-AIR – (in opera)* |
| 6 |
DINAH – (hid an)*. Dinah was the cook in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. |
| 7 |
LIVERPOOL – another one I got from the crossing letters. A search on Google uncovered the fact that the Tate Liverpool has had major Performance Art exhibitions. Maybe that’s it. |
| 8 |
OUNCE – quotation from the poem Thalaba the Destroyer by Robert Southey. |
| 14 |
CALDICOTT – (old tactic)*. Got this from the anagram, unable to track down the art dealer. |
| 16 |
NARRATIVE – R, R.A. inside NATIVE. |
| 17 |
EXISTENCE – Sartre’s 1943 essay L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness).
|
| 19 |
OCTOPUS – Dear Octopus, 1938 play by Dodie Smith. |
| 20 |
TOREROS – ref. Ernest Hemingway’s 1932 non-fiction book about bullfighting. |
| 21 |
PANIC – “PAN-IC”. 1936 play by Archibald MacLeish. |
| 22 |
ADELA – hidden in “De Sade laughingly”. Adela Quested, character in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. |
| 24 |
EASEL – EASE,L |
I thought for a moment I had tracked down the art dealer with the character of Caldicott in The Lady Vanishes, which is based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. But apparently the character wasn’t in the novel. Drat.
I saw the Liverpool thing as referring to the poets of The Liverpool Scene – Henri, McGough et al.
I should have got TOREROS first time through, but I had a truly awful senior moment and just couldn’t think of it. (I’ve even sung the damned word in French, as I once took part in a recording of this chunk from Bizet’s Carmen in my younger, singing days: “Les voici! Voici la quadrille! / La quadrille des toreros”.) If I’d done so, PARKINSON and OCTOPUS would have fallen out quite quickly, but instead, with O—–S in place for 19D, I assumed the answer was going to be OYSTERS (who the hell eats octopus?) and spent a good 10 minutes floundering around before finally getting PARKINSON and then (immediately) OCTOPUS. Unfortunately my allotted 30 minutes were almost up, and as I’d plumped for CORELLI for 20A in the hope that Arcangelo had a brother who was a painter, I could only think of COREROS, which sounded vaguely familiar and perhaps had something to do with CORRIDA. (Doh!) Having said all that, I’d bunged in PHILASTER as a pure guess in the last few seconds, so I didn’t really deserve an “all correct”.
The annoying thing is that 19D is a misclue: Dodie Smith is Miss Smith or Mrs Beesley, not Mrs Smith! (Would that have made a difference? Actually I think “Miss Smith” might have done.)
I’ve no idea about the “cryptic” element of 11A (HEYER) either. I think you’re right about Sir Thomas Fuller at 3D. I agree with sotira about 7D (see this wikipedia article).
14D is definitely on the obscure side. CALDICOTT is the name of Hurtle Duffield’s dealer in Patrick White’s The Vivisector.