Solving time: 30 minutes (3 wrong)
If only I’d watched Walt Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians I’d probably have got PERDITA, and that would have been enough to give me SPOT (hah! another Nina?) and FREE, but as it was I was short of these three at around 20 minutes and still missing them at 30 minutes. A reference to The Winter’s Tale or to the actress Mary Robinson would have been more up my street, but I suppose they’ve been used too often in the past.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | THEOPHILUS – a Byzantine emperor (813-842), and the name of a lunar crater; the surface reading refers to Aphra Behn’s play of 1687 (I was once inveigled into playing a walk-on part in a performance of The Emperor of the Moon at the end of a Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society Summer School – just thought I’d mention it) |
| 6 | SPOT – a quotation from How the Leopard Got His Spots, one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (easy to guess once I’d looked up PERDITA and had the P in place – though I still couldn’t remember where it came from until I’d googled it) |
| 9 | PERIODICAL – Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) (1975) is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi |
| 10 | FREE – William Golding wrote Free Fall (1959) (remembered only after I’d looked up PERDITA and had the R in place) |
| 12 | BACH – BA + Ch; the composer could be any member of the Bach family whose most illustrious member is Johann Sebastian (1685-1750) |
| 13 | HIERATICA – (ta’i chi era)*; the finest papyrus, as used for sacred writings |
| 15 | THE ALTAR – The Altar of the Dead is a short story by Henry James, first published in his collection Terminations (1895) |
| 16 | TYBALT – the name (which I misspelt a few weeks ago, but not this time 🙂 of one of the Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; and an alternative to “Tibert” as the name of the cat in Reynard the Fox |
| 18 | AUTUMN – fall (in N. America, at any rate); “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” in Keats’s poem To Autumn |
| 20 | SELEUCIA – (Lee + US)* + CIA; Seleucia Pieria was the port of Antioch (the capital of the western Seleucid empire) |
| 23 | BOLKONSKI – in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonski, after being seriously wounded at the battle of Borodino, dies while being nursed by his former fiancée, Countess Natasha Rostova (somehow the right answer managed to stumble its way forward from the back of my mind) |
| 24 | OBOL – an ancient Greek coin (the one you put under a dead person’s tongue to pay Charon for ferrying them across the Styx); and a modern Greek unit of weight equal to one tenth of a gram |
| 26 | RUIN – R(eally) U(nusual), I(nnovative) N(ovel) |
| 27 | PHALAROPES – Alan Paton wrote Too Late the Phalarope (1953) |
| 28 | YANK – the protagonist of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Hairy Ape (1922) |
| 29 | RAWSTHORNE – raw + hornets*; the composer could be either Alan Rawsthorne (1905-71) (whose Bagatelles for piano I used to strum my way through and whose Cello Sonata you can find here and (continued) here on YouTube) or Noel Rawsthorne (born 1929) |
| Â | |
| Down | |
| 1 | TAPE – C. S. Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters (1942) |
| 2 | EURYALE – one of the three Gorgons, whose gaze turned those they inflicted it on to stone |
| 3 | PROTHALAMION – (harm optional)* |
| 4 | IRISHMAN – Somerville and Ross wrote An Irish Cousin (1889) |
| 5 | USAGES – U + sages |
| 7 | PERDITA – one of the dalmatians in Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) (I’m afraid I’ve never read the book or seen the films, so this wasn’t one of the Perditas I knew about) |
| 8 | THE MARTIAN – George du Maurier wrote The Martian (1898) (I’m not entirely sure of the significance of “warrior” in the clue, but suspect it could simply be that Mars was the Roman god of war) |
| 11 | LADY DE BOURGH – Lady Catherine de Bourgh is Mr Darcy’s rich and patronising aunt in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice |
| 14 | STRAWBERRY – Stephen Poliakoff wrote the play Strawberry Fields (1976) |
| 17 | PERICLES – p + Eric + les; this sounds like a reference to Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, but Tyre is, and I believe was, in Lebanon rather than Syria |
| 19 | TOLKIEN – (not like)*; the fantasist is J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973) |
| 21 | CROPPER – a citation from the OED |
| 22 | ISCHIA – hidden in “dISC HIAtus” (no extraneous words for once) |
| 25 | ISLE – a quote from The Bishop of Rum-ti-Foo, one of W. S. Gilbert’s Bab Ballads
|
I really should have remembered LADY DE BOURGH from P&P but the name wouldn’t come, ditto BOLKONSKI (although I knew the clue was about Andrei, I couldn’t remember his second name, despite having B?L???S?I).
By contrast, I finished all bar three of this week’s puzzle in under 15 minutes without aids, although it was more than 50% guesswork.