TLS 844 (13 August)

Author   tony_severPosted on Categories Daily Cryptic
Solving time: 30:00 (1 wrong)

At present I just don’t seem to be able to nail a TLS puzzle, and again finished with one letter wrong: BELL instead of DELL at 25A. GALT (10A) and ALDINGTON (3D) felt like guesses, but (like BOLKONSKY a couple of puzzles ago) were perhaps lurking in some gloomy recess at the back of my mind. FELICITY (6D) was definitely a guess, but an obvious one given the lack of alternatives. For some reason I made far heavier weather of this puzzle than I should have done and in the end used practically my full half-hour, with the last 5 minutes or so spent mulling over the four clues above.

Across
1 ANNALS – hidden in “thomas mANN ALSo”
5 TAFFRAIL – Taff + rail; Captain Taprell Dorling wrote naval books under the pseudonym “Taffrail”
9 GOLDEN KEEL – The Golden Keel (1962) was Desmond Bagley’s first novel
10 GALT – John Galt wrote Annals of the Parish (1821)
11 DIONYSIA – (Noisy ad I)*; an ancient Greek festival in honour of Dionysus
12 CELSUS – hidden in “a parCEL SUSpiciously deposited at Victoria station”; the Greek philosopher Celsus wrote On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians: the original is lost, but Origen’s Contra Celsum reproduces it almost in its entirety (the wordplay was perhaps intended to put solvers on the wrong line – the Brighton line, to be specific 🙂
13 OMIT – O + mit
15 INTAGLIO – cryptic definition
18 CLINGING – John Mortimer entitled his memoirs Clinging to the Wreckage (1982)
19 OUST – US in OT
21 POIROT – sounds like poireau, the French for “leek”, which in turn sounds like “leak”
23 ERASTIAN – eras + anti*; as Chambers (2003) rather tartly puts it: “… a person who would subordinate the church jurisdiction to the state (a position not held by Erastus at all)”
25 DELL – Ethel M. Dell wrote By Request (1928) (I’d no idea about this one and bunged in BELL in the hope that the author might be Clive or Vanessa or Quentin or Gertrude or …: perhaps there’s a Nina here, since The Mating Season (see 5D) includes an excerpt from a novel by Rosie M. Banks)
26 COSMOPOLIS – (Limo scoops)*; Cosmopolis (2003) is a novel by Don DeLillo
27 PERELMAN Рp̬re + L + man; the American humorist is S. J. Perelman (1904-79), perhaps best remembered (certainly by me) for co-writing the scripts for the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers
28 HIDDEN – The Hidden Sin (1866) is a novel by Frances Browne
 
Down
2 NAOMI – The Book of Ruth in the Old Testament describes how Ruth first marries Mahlon, the son of Elimelech and Naomi, and then, after his death, Boaz (a kinsman of Naomi) by whom she has a son Obed “who begat Jesse, and Jesse begat David”: so Naomi was not a direct ancestor of David – however, the wikipedia states that “by Levirate customs [Obed] is also considered a son or heir to Elimelech, and thus Naomi and Elimelech’s legal son”
3 ALDINGTON – the writer Richard Aldington (1892-1962) was a close friend of Lawrence Durrell, and their correspondence was published in 1981 as Literary Lifelines
4 SANEST – a citation from the OED
5 THE MATING SEASON – Sir Pelham Grenville (P. G.) Wodehouse wrote The Mating Season (1949)
6 FELICITY – Sister Felicity is one of the principle characters in Muriel Spark’s novel The Abbess of Crewe (1974) satirising Watergate (the New York Times review gives the flavor 🙂
7 REGAL – I imagined this might refer to some book entitled The Action by Stephen King or Ellery Queen or some other regally-named author, but there are several regally-named authors and I haven’t been able to identify the right one; or perhaps the clue refers to Reg King, lead singer of the pop group The Action – but is he literary enough to appear in a TLS crossword?
8 I CLAUDIUS – Claudius is Hamlet’s poisonous uncle in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius (1934)
14 MELPOMENE – the muse of tragedy (I made ridiculously heavy weather of this clue, imagining that the answer was going to be the name of some tragic heroine, and kicking myself when the penny eventually dropped)
16 GHOST ROAD – (Road Hog St.)*; Pat Barker’s novel The Ghost Road won the 1995 Booker Prize (an anagram which includes one of the target words unchanged has to be regarded as pretty naff!)
17 VIATICUM – another citation from the OED
20 NABOTH – n/a + both; the story of Naboth and his vineyard is told in 1 Kings 21
22 RILKE – hidden in “apRIL KEatsian style”; the lyric poet is Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
24 ALICE – a quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act 5, Scene 2): Alice is one of Princess Katharine’s ladies in waiting, who speaks English only “un peu”

Late-breaking news: 0 wrong next week 🙂

Final query: what happened to the puzzle that should have appeared on 27 August? (was there an acrostic that hasn’t yet appeared online?)

6 comments on “TLS 844 (13 August)”

  1. The closest I’ve come to completing one of these unaided. I had exactly the same mistake as you, Tony, guessing at Bell.

    I hope the News of the World doesn’t pick up on your announcing next week’s results today, Tony. I don’t know if we can withstand a crossword betting scandal.

    1. If people are betting on whether I solve the TLS puzzle correctly, I’ve clearly spoilt things by announcing the result a week early – but I’m not sure if that quite counts as a scandal.

      Now that you’ve mentioned it though, I’ll be on the lookout for someone offering me piles of dosh in used notes to throw the next easy puzzle :-).

  2. I had about 5 left to get before having to look things up. There was a lot of guesswork involved though, but it all turned out to be correct. I wasn’t able to track down the regally-named author either. I knew The Mating Game thanks to a Phi Listener about 3 or 4 years ago, which prompted me to read it (even though the necessary information about hangovers was in the first chapter).
    1. I’ve tracked down the Listener puzzle. It was no. 3907: The Consequence of Being Mortal by Phi, published on 09/12/2006. The Listener has guided my reading choices more than once – I read L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between after solving no. 3966: Mercury’s Whereabouts by Dysart, and re-read a few Sherlock Holmes stories as required too.
      1. I remember Phi’s puzzle, though it didn’t inspire me to read the book. Not that I’m averse to Wodehouse – I must have read a fair number of his books at one time or another.

        The daily Times cryptic (in the days when it was more literary) must have inspired me to read one or two books, and the quotations certainly inspired me to read or re-read a fair amount of poetry.

        Novels that spring instantly to mind are The Pickwick Papers, which I’d never got round to reading in my teens or twenties, but which was a frequent source of clues, and Mrs Gaskell’s Ruth. And I remember reading a couple of Kipling short stories: The Bridge Builders and The Brushwood Boy. I expect there were several others – but I resisted Meredith and most of Thackeray, both of whom used to make regular appearances.

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