Solving time: 30:00 (4 wrong)
Actually about 7 minutes (4 wrong), with the last 23 minutes spent trying desperately to come up with ANOUILH (doh! how did I miss him?), ANAGOGE (half-familiar once I’d looked it up), SULTANA (I’d no idea what the clue referred to) and ARRABAL (whom I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of). I got off to a good start with 17½ clues solved at a first reading (I couldn’t remember SWANN’s first name at 16A) – and it would have been 18½ if I’d taken a chance with UKRIDGE. A second run-through produced a further 4½ reasonably quickly, followed by another one after a slight gap (caused by wrong enumeration – without which I’d probably have cracked it on my first run-through). But that was it!
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | TRUMPET-MAJOR – in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Trumpet-Major, Bob (Robert) Loveday, the brother of John Loveday (the trumpet-major of the title), is a sailor who serves on HMS Victory under the command of Flag Captain Thomas Masterman Hardy (as in “Kiss me, Hardy”) |
| 8 | SOLARIS – sailors*; Andrei Tarkovsky directed the film Solaris (1972) |
| 9 | ARRABAL – the playwright Fernando Arrabal is associated with the Theatre of the Absurd and was a co-founder of the Panic Movement |
| 11 | ASMODAY – as + Mo |
| 12 | ANGERED – hidden in “chANGE REDgauntlet, already” |
| 13 | DONNE – don(n)e; John Donne (1572-1631) |
| 14 | OPPENHEIM – op + pen + Heim; in his time E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) was called “the prince of story-tellers” |
| 16 | SLAUGHTER – s + laughter; the thriller writer is presumably Karin Slaughter (born 1971) rather than Frank G. Slaughter (1908-2001) |
| 19 | SATYR – “satire” |
| 21 | OROTUND – a citation from the OED |
| 23 | GALUPPI – Robert Browning’s poem A Toccata of Galuppi’s appears in his collection Men and Women (1855); the word “toccata” is derived from the Italian toccare, meaning “to touch”; however, Baldassare Galuppi (1706-85) apparently didn’t actually write any such work (you can find a piece he did write here) |
| 24 | EDITION – (it + I) in E + Don |
| 25 | ANAGOGE – an agoge (“in ancient Greek music, tempo”); “mystical interpretation” (these quoted definitions are straight out of Chambers – I’ve almost certainly come across one or both before, but had forgotten them) |
| 26 | CHARLES SWANN – the title character of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann (1913), which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated as Swann’s Way |
| Down | |
| 1 | TELAMON – male (rev.) in ton; Telamon, son of King Aeacus of Aegina, was one of the Jason’s Argonauts |
| 2 | UKRIDGE – P. G. Wodehouse’s novel Love Among the Chickens (1906) describes how Ukridge’s old friend Jeremy Garnet falls in love with Phyllis, daughter of Professor Derrick |
| 3 | PUSSYFOOT – another citation from the OED |
| 4 | TIARA – hidden in “question porTIA RAises” |
| 5 | ARRAGON – in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver casket (the one with “the portrait of a blinking idiot” in it) from the three that Portia presents to her suitors at Belmont |
| 6 | OSBORNE – the playwright is John Osborne (1929-94) and the royal house is Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s home on the Isle of Wight |
| 7 | OSBALDISTONE – Frank Osbaldistone is the narrator of Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy (1817) |
| 10 | LADY MORTIMER – in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Pt 1, Lady Mortimer sings (in Welsh), and Hotspur asks his own wife (Mortimer’s sister) to sing too, but she refuses |
| 15 | PHRYGIANS – (angry ship)*; another name for Montanists, followers of a 2nd-century heresy started by Montanus of Phrygia (I probably wasted a minute out of my 7 minutes on this clue, fooled by the enumeration (6,3) instead of (9)) |
| 17 | ANOUILH – Jean Anouilh wrote La Répétition ou l’Amour puni (1950), translated as The Rehearsal (an embarrassing failure on my part! – I thought this might be some reference to Buckingham’s play The Rehearsal and simply failed to spot that ANOUILH would fit A-O-I-H) |
| 18 | GAUTIER – (argue it)*; Théophile Gautier (1811-72) |
| 19 | SULTANA – Charles Johnson wrote the play The Sultaness (1717) (I’m afraid I’m not familiar with either the man or the play – always assuming SULTANA is actually the right answer and this is the right reference) |
| 20 | TYPHOON – the title of a novella (1902) by Joseph Conrad |
| 22 | DANTE – the two poets are Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Dante Gabriel (as in archangel) Rossetti (1828-82) |
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