Solving time: 21:16 (1 wrong)
I’d no idea about CHLOE, never having either seen or read Back to Methuselah. Apart from that, this was mostly plain sailing, with the unknown answers readily guessable, though I spent the last 5 minutes convincing myself that there weren’t any alternatives to the only half-familiar ADVERSARIA and LIAR.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | VADEMECUMS – a barely cryptic definition: “certainly portable” perhaps refers to the meaning (“go with me”) of the Latin from which it’s derived (or maybe I’m missing something) |
| 6 | ETHE – the OED’s only 15th-century citation for “ethe” meaning “easily” is “c1460 Towneley Myst. 193 Oone worde myght thou speke ethe” |
| 9 | TITUS ALONE – the final volume (1959) of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy |
| 10 | LUNA – Jorge Luis Borges wrote Luna de enfrente (1926), which can be translated roughly as The Moon Opposite |
| 12 | PETER FLEMING – peter (= safe) + Fleming (= Belgian); Peter Fleming was the brother of Ian Fleming (author of the James Bond books) and was famous for his travel books, particularly Brazilian Adventure (1933) which contains the quotation “São Paulo is like Reading, only much farther away” 🙂 (I’m not sure what “said to be” is all about) |
| 15 | ROULETTES – a citation from the OED |
| 17 | DRILL – Dull Reading In Latin Literature |
| 18 | ACKER – ac(k)er; the American experimental writer is presumably Kathy Acker (1947-97) |
| 19 | LAODICEAN – = luke-warm; Paula Power is the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881) |
| 20 | FLYING VISITS – Peter Fleming wrote A Flying Visit (1940), “a humorous novel about an unintended visit to Britain by Adolf Hitler” according to wikipedia |
| 24 | CAIN – the biblical character who killed his brother Abel (Genesis 4:8); the crime writer is presumably James M. Cain (1892-1977), author of three novels made into classic films: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Mildred Pierce (1941) and Double Indemnity (1943) |
| 25 | PSALTERIES – (priest’s ale)*, (rite lapses)*; (sterile spa)*; (as reptiles)* (all those anagrams don’t really make for a good surface reading!) |
| 26 | DIET – Beachcomber (= “one seeking seaside scraps”), aka J. B. Morton, wrote A Diet of Thistles (1938) |
| 27 | ADVERSARIA – defined in Chambers (2003) as “miscellaneous notes; a commonplace book” (I suppose a vademecum could be a collection of miscellaneous notes, but I don’t find this clue terribly convincing) |
| Down | |
| 1 | VITA – Latin for “life”; the model for the hero(ine) of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) was Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), with whom Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair |
| 2 | DUTY – Samuel Smiles wrote Duty (1860) |
| 3 | MRS VENEERING – Mr and Mrs Veneering are a nouveau-riche couple in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864/5) |
| 4 | CHLOE – in George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (Part V) Chloe (aka The Maiden) says: “I want to get away from our eternal dancing and music, and just sit down by myself and think about numbers” |
| 5 | MANIFESTO – (of inmates)*; the social reformer Robert Owen (1771-1858) wrote Manifesto of Robert Owen (1840) |
| 7 | THUCIDIDES – (I deduct his)*; Thomas Nicholls wrote The hystory writtone by Thucidides the Athenyan of the warre which was betweene the Peloponesians and the Athenyans (1550); the Greek historian (c. 460 – c. 395 BC) is normally spelled THUCYDIDES nowadays |
| 8 | EVANGELINE – Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie is an 1847 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the “tall chap”), and Evangeline is a poem by Edgar Allen Poe (the “curtailed poet”) included in his 1848 essay The Rationale of Verse (fortunately I knew the Longfellow poem, otherwise I’d have been torn between EVANGELINE and EVANGELINA) |
| 11 | HEADMISTRESS – Miss Mackay, the headmistress of Marcia Blaine School of Girls, is Miss Brodie’s Nemesis in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) (I wasted time on this clue desperately trying to remember the name of the headmistress, which I had an uneasy feeling was shorter than the 12 letters required – until I eventually had enough crossing letters for the penny to drop) |
| 13 | CREAM-FACED – a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 3): “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!” (one of the two citations for “cream-faced” in the OED) |
| 14 | TURKEY TIME – turkey = “a dramatic flop” (US slang); Turkey Time (1931) was one of Ben Travers’s Aldwych Farces |
| 16 | TELEVISED – (veiled set)* |
| 21 | SALVE – = “a soothing ointment” and “hail” (in Latin); Ave (1911), Salve (1912) and Vale (1914) are the three volumes of George Moore’s memoirs Hail and Farewell |
| 22 | LIAR – Pierre Corneille wrote Le Menteur (The Liar) (1644) |
| 23 | ISSA – hidden in “parIS SAaint cloud”; the haiku poet is Kobayashi Nobuyuki (1763-1828) who used the pen name Issa (一茶) meaning “one (cup of) tea” (and whom I first came across in TLS puzzle No. 822) |
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