TLS 839 – close but no cigar

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Other Crosswords
I came very close to solving this completely on the train without any help from books or Internet, but fell just 5 short. I fell foul of the almost weekly enumeration error at 8D, which I would certainly have got if it had been marked as (2,6), which would have also confirmed 10A and 6D. However, I didn’t know 1D but should have worked out 11A.

Across
1 DECIBEL – quotation, easy enough to work out from the context.
5 PYRAMID – The Pyramid, 1967 novel by William Golding.
9 ARISTIDES – ARISTIDE’S. Aristides the Just (530-468BC) was the Athenian statesman; Jean-Bertrand Aristide is the former Haitian president, currently in exile in South Africa.
10 MARAT – Marat/Sade is a 1963 play by Peter Weiss (full title The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade).
11 ODILE – (croc)ODILE. One of the characters in the ballet Swan Lake, Odette’s double.
12 BOCCACCIO – Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), wrote Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta in 1343. Wikipedia tells me it was the first psychological novel in Western literature.
14 THE CORN IS GREEN – a semi-autobiographical play by Emlyn Williams, written in 1940. There was also a 1945 film version starring Bette Davis.
17 A TEMPORARY LIFE – a 1973 novel by David Storey.
21 CATACOMBS – TACO in CAMBS.
23 SALAD – the phrase “salad days” was coined by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra. In the speech at the end of Act One in which Cleopatra is regretting her youthful dalliances with Julius Caesar she says: “…My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood…”
24 LORCA – (carol)*. Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet who wrote Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) in 1928.
25 MAURITIUS – Jack Aubrey is the lead character in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of historical naval novels. The Mauritius Command is the 4th in the series, written in 1977.
26 THE DEAD – 1914 short story by James Joyce. Final story in the collection Dubliners.
27 OPHELIA – Her brother is Laertes. The relevant snippet from Hamlet is from Act I Scene 3: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Down
1 DRAGON – A Dragon Laughed and other poems, 1930 collection by Eric Linklater.
2 CEILIDH – (ie child)*.
3 BUTTERCUP – Little Buttercup is a character in Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. From her song:

Then buy of your Buttercup — dear Little Buttercup;
Sailors should never be shy;
So, buy of your Buttercup — poor Little Buttercup;
Come, of your Buttercup buy!
4 LADY BERTRAM – Fanny Price’s aunt in the Jane Austen novel, who is always portrayed as indolent and useless. She makes one comment which sums her up: “I cannot think what the matter is with me…I feel quite stupid.”
5 PAS – double (French) definition.
6 RUMBA – misquotation from Budd Schulberg’s 1993 novel. In the book, the sentence goes: “He was filling her plate for her, drinking brandy with her, dancing with her out on the patio to the rhumba orchestra.”
7 MIRACLE – Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1947 book by C. S. Lewis.
8 DR THORNE – eponymous character in Trollope’s 3rd Barsetshire novel. He befriends Martha Dunstable in the book. If the enumeration had been right I would have got this without looking it up.
13 CHIAROSCURO – (chic our Rosa)*
15 GOLDSMITH – double definition. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) is the dramatist and novelist.
16 LANCELOT – LANCE + LOT
18 EUTERPE – (Peter)* next to EU, Greek muse of lyric poetry.
19 FULFILL – quotation from Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur:

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
20 ODESSA – hidden inside “goOD ESSAy”. The Odessa File, 1972 novel by Frederick Forsyth.
22 CHASE – James Hadley Chase is the novelist, who wrote The Whiff of Money in 1969.
25 MAD – The Mad Cyclist, 1970 poetry collection by Leland Bardwell.

One comment on “TLS 839 – close but no cigar”

  1. No cigar for me either, I’m afraid. I finished in a decent time (9:22) but with 1 wrong: I was torn between DEACON and DRAGON for 1D and went for DEACON.

    For once I saw through the enumeration error at 8D almost immediately, but I had the T and N in place when I reached it which almost certainly helped.

    I’m not convinced by the spelling of FULFILL at 19D. All the versions I can lay my hands on, including the ones in my great-grandmother’s copy of Tennyson’s poems (dated 1884) and in Project Gutenberg, spell it FULFIL.

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