TLS 841 (16th July)

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solved in three or four sessions, only about half of it going without assistance. Definitely one of the harder ones, although 842 was even tougher.

Across
1 CLERIHEW – “A verse”. A comic verse form invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
6 VACANT – A Vacant Possession (1978), poetry collection by James Fenton, and Vacant Possession (1986), novel by Hilary Mantel. I haven’t read this one, but strongly recommend her Booker prizewinner from last year, Wolf Hall.
9 MAOISM – (mimosa)*. Rubbish clue, defining an ism with an ist!
10 LONESOME – Lonesome Dove (1985), Pulitzer prizewinning novel by Larry McMurtry.
11 RESPIGHI – Ottorino Respighi, Italian composer. He wrote a trilogy of symphonic poems evoking Roman places, one of which was Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome).
12 REMOTE – Hilaire Belloc was a good friend of G. K. Chesterton’s and wrote some Lines to a Don, which began:

Remote and ineffectual Don
That dared attack my Chesterton.

No idea who he was referring to though.
13 ASTON – a character in The Caretaker, a 1959 play by Harold Pinter. Also Aston University in Birmingham.
14 IMAGINARY – An Imaginary Life (1978), a novel by David Malouf.
17 PROFESSOR – The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë, published posthumously in 1857.
19 ORION – a giant huntsman of Greek mythology. There’s a poem Orion by Charles G. D. Roberts, but it doesn’t mention borders at all. Maybe there’s another explanation.
22 RETINA – RE TINA. The eponymous Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion is called Matthäus Tina.
23 GARDINER – Eunice Gardiner is a character in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
24 ADVOCATE – Morris West’s 1959 novel The Devil’s Advocate.
25 INSERT – (Rent is)*
26 DIANNE – (in Aden)*. In the novel Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, the lead character Renton picks up Dianne at a nightclub. He takes her home and sleeps with her, unaware that she’s only 14.
27 EVENSONG – EVEN SONG.

Down
2 LEADERS – double definition.
3 RAINPROOF – RAIN PROOF. Rain was a short story by W. Somerset Maugham.
4 HOMAGE – Homage to Clio (“a muse”), 1960 poem by W. H. Auden.
5 WILLIAM CONGREVE – author of the play Love for Love (1695).
6 VANBRUGH – Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) was an architect as well as a dramatist, and designed Blenheim Palace.
7 AMOROSA – a pure guess, but it’s practically the only word that fits. I had a look at Herbert’s Description of the Persian Monarchy on Google Books, but it was published in 1638 and hence not very easy to OCR (which is how Google’s text search works).
8 TREVELYAN – the historian is George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), but Voss’s mystic companion (in Voss by Patrick White) is Laura Trevalyan.
13 AMPERSAND – quite a clever clue, this one. There’s a Mount Ampersand in the Adirondacks, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the clue. Ferdinand Mount wrote The Man Who Rode Ampersand in 1975. In the novel, Ampersand is a famous racehorse who won the Gold Cup.
15 NARCISSUS – cryptic definition for the mythological character who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and wasted away, unable to take his eyes off it.
16 ESCAPADE – a 1953 comic novel by Rex Warner.
18 OCTAVIA – OCT + A VIA. A 1977 novel by Jilly Cooper.
20 OVERRUN – quotation.
21 BRAINE – John Braine, who wrote Room at the Top, was one of the Angry Young Men of British literature in the 1950s.

2 comments on “TLS 841 (16th July)”

  1. 30 minutes (6 wrong) – a horrible illustration of how one rash guess can screw up a whole corner. I had —-E—N in place for 8D, but I’d no idea who “Voss’s mystic companion” was so I was reduced to working through the names of historians. I was actually on the point of persuading TREVELYAN forward from the back of my mind, when I suddenly spotted that CLARENDON would fit, and bunged him in. The fact that the final D (which initially looked promising) didn’t allow any sensible answer to 14A should have made me think again.

    The real annoyance is that I missed an easy win at 6D (VANBRUGH). I knew there were some poets/playwrights/authors who were also soldiers (Richard Lovelace, for example) and imagined the answer was one of them.

    12A (REMOTE) was my only correct answer in the NE corner – I got to know the poem very young, as my brother (15 years older than me) used to enjoy reciting it – but I’ve no idea who the don referred to is.

    I’ve no idea about “the Borders” in 19A (ORION) either.

    7D is the one and only citation for AMOROSA in the (online) OED.

    I wasn’t too worried about 9A, on the grounds that MAOISM can be described as “Marxist”.

    (I’d have had 842 all correct in about 20 minutes if I’d known my children’s fiction (or Disney films).)

  2. Actually, now I come to think about it, Vanbrugh had been a soldier (though he left the army some time before the battle of Blenheim), so I’ve no possible excuse for missing him. (Sigh!)

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