Solving time: 26:58 (1 wrong)
I started reasonably well, but as usual slowed dramatically and finished up needing to make a number of guesses, one of which (KATY PARR instead of KATY CARR) turned out to be wrong. The former sounded vaguely familiar (damn that Henry the Eighth!) and I didn’t spend enough time working through other possibilities. Plenty of Shakespearean characters this week, with LEPIDUS, GUIDERIUS, IACHIMO and EGEUS all making an appearance, as well as a reference to the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet..
There’s the definite suggestion of a Nina with BUNNY GARNETT appearing at 6D and 21D, but I can’t make anything of the symmetrically placed PAINTER EGEUS at 2D and 23D.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | LEPIDUS – (Pius led)*; Marcus Aemilius Lepidus was a member of the Second Triumvirate along with Octavius (later Augustus) Caesar and Mark Antony (all three appear in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar) |
| 5 | TABITHA – Mrs Tabitha Twitchit, the mother of Tom Kitten, Mittens and Moppet, appears in a number of Beatrix Potter’s children’s stories, particularly The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907) |
| 9 | CHIEF – Thomas Kenneally wrote Chief of Staff (1991) under the pseudonym William Coyle |
| 10 | STEINBECK – a quote from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962): “Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession.” (I only came across this book fairly recently – Charley is a poodle) |
| 11 | TUTTIS – the plural of tutti, a passage for the whole orchestra or choir |
| 12 | KATY CARR – the title character in Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did and its sequels (I think if I’d spotted CARR as a possibility, I’d have plumped for it because of the alliteration, but I thought of PARR straight away and it must have crowded out other possibilities) |
| 14 | VERTU – v(aluation) + true*; since the word (meaning “connoisseurship”) can also be spelled VIRTU, some suitable wordplay (as here) is essential for an unambiguous solution |
| 15 | PACHELBEL – (cable help)*; Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706) is best known for his Canon, but he wrote lots of other good stuff as well |
| 18 | SAINT JOAN – “offstage” and “prompt box” are presumably references to Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) |
| 20 | MAGOG – according to legend, the two giants Gog and Magog were defeated by Brutus and chained to the gates of his palace on the site of London’s Guildhall (where you can find statues of them) |
| 22 | LACHESIS – the name of one of the three Greek Fates; also a genus of snakes which includes the bushmaster |
| 24 | ARARAT – hidden in “sahARA, RATher waterless”; the mountains of Ararat are where Noah’s Ark landed according to the Bible (Genesis, 8:4) |
| 26 | GUIDERIUS – guide + Uris*; a son of Cymbeline (he appears in Shakespeare’s play) who succeeded his father as king and was killed fighting the Romans |
| 27 | LOEWE – sounds like “low”; (Alan Jay) Lerner and (Frederick) Loewe wrote the words and music for a musical film version of The Little Prince based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s children’s story – it was a critical and box-office flop |
| 28 | COOKSON – Long John Silver was the sea cook in R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island; the novelist is Catherine Cookson (1906-98) |
| 29 | ALASTOR – a last or; Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816) is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley; in Classical Greek it means “avenger” (= nemesis) |
| Down | |
| 1 | LOCATIVES – (Clovis ate)* |
| 2 | PAINTER – John Berger’s first novel was A Painter of Our Time (1958) |
| 3 | DIFFICULT – Martin Boyd wrote A Difficult Young Man (1955) |
| 4 | SASH – S(onnet) A(s) S(incere) H(omily) |
| 5 | THE BALCONY – the English translation of Le Balcon (1956) by Jean Genet; the “balcony scene” is the most famous scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet |
| 6 | BUNNY – the Bunny Hug was an American dance of the early 20th century (I’ve danced several dances of that period to ragtime music, but sadly never this one); Bunny (Harry Manders) is A. J. Raffles’s sidekick in E. W. Hornung’s stories |
| 7 | THE LAMB – the (definite article) + (Charles) Lamb (who wrote Essays of Elia); The Lamb is a poem by William Blake published in his Songs of Innocence (1789) |
| 8 | ACKER – (h)acker; Kathy Acker followed Dickens in writing Great Expectations (1982) |
| 13 | OPPOSITION – a citation from the OED |
| 16 | ESMERALDA – the gypsy dancer in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) in which Quasimodo, the dorsally-challenged character of the English title, acts as her protector |
| 17 | LIGHTYEAR – light year (= a very long way); Buzz Lightyear is one of the leading characters in the Walt Disney Company’s Toy Story films (can he really be classified as a “cult” character? is that the justication for his appearance in the TLS puzzle?) |
| 19 | IACHIMO – for once not a citation from the OED but a straight quote from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (Act 2, Scene 5) |
| 21 | GARNETT – “garnet”; Constance Garnett (1861-1946) translated works by Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goncharov, Tolstoy and Turgenev (David “Bunny” Garnett (1892-1981), author of the strange novella Lady into Fox (1922), was her son) |
| 22 | LOGIC – Lewis Carroll wrote The Game of Logic (1886) |
| 23 | EGEUS – another quotation from Shakespeare, this time from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act 1, Scene 1) where Lysander says: “You have her father’s love, Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him.” |
| 25 | ASIA – yet another quote, this time from Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (Part 2, Act 4, Scene 3): “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! / What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day …?” (this clue could have – indeed probably did – come up in the daily cryptic in times past, but it would no doubt provoke howls of anger/derision if it appeared these days) |
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