Solving time: about 25 minutes (3 wrong)
Oh dear! Perhaps if I’d thought harder, I might have ended up all correct, but I made two unforced errors (missing MONSARRAT and SUSS), and although I didn’t know STROGANOVA, if I’d thought of Caryl Brahms (and remembered A Bullet in the Ballet and hadn’t been put off by the rather strange wording of the clue), I might perhaps have guessed that as well. I had plenty of time, as once again I’d cleaned up almost all the puzzle in around 12 minutes.
The puzzle contains a couple of contributors to The New Yorker (THURBER and STEINBERG) but they don’t really add up to a Nin(i)a(n).
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | SALAMIS – plural of “salami”; the Battle of Salamis is one of the great naval battles of history, celebrated in Byron’s poem The Isles of Greece:
Wonderful stuff, but amazingly no longer in the ODQ! |
| 5 | THURBER – hidden in “arTHUR BERgson’s work” (whoever Arthur Bergson is, but perhaps the setter meant Arthur Berson); the humorist is James Thurber (1894-1961) |
| 9 | ELGIN – el + gin; the connoisseur of Greek art is Lord Elgin, responsible for liberating the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens |
| 10 | SLUGHORNS – “slughorn” was an earlier form of the word “slogan”, but Chatterton erroneously used it to mean a trumpet, and Browning followed suit (recalling how he wrongly interpreted the word “twat” as meaning part of a nun’s apparel 🙂 |
| 11 | NINIAN – hidden in “scholarly bookmeN IN IAN hay’s novel”; Saint Ninian (c. 360 – c. 432), the first known missionary in Scotland, was consecrated bishop by the Pope in Rome in 394 |
| 12 | CHARMIAN – charm + Ian; Charmian is one of Cleopatra’s attendants in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra |
| 14 | ENSOR – Norse*; the Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) had an English father and a Flemish mother |
| 15 | TETE A TETE – = intimate; the opera company Tête à Tête runs what has now become an annual event called “Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival” at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith |
| 18 | GHOST TOWN – presumably a reference to ghost writers |
| 20 | ABRAM – AB + ram (= warship); a + Bram (Stoker); so who needs a definition already? |
| 22 | LUPERCAL – a simple quotation, “on the Lupercal” presumably meaning “during the Lupercalia“, since the Lupercal is the cave where Romulus and Remus were found by the she-wolf that suckled them |
| 24 | MERLIN – two meanings: a species of small falcon and the Arthurian magician |
| 26 | GREYSTOKE – grey + Stoke; in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, the real name of Tarzan (meaning “white-skin” in ape language) is John Clayton, who inherits the title Lord Greystoke after his parents die while he is still a baby |
| 27 | NAIAD – Diana* |
| 28 | SESTINA – “est” in (a sin)* |
| 29 | GENGHIS – after sacking Bukhara in 1219, Genghis Khan assembled the survivors in the city’s main mosque and declared
|
| Down | |
| 1 | STEINBERG – (enters big)*; Saul Steinberg (1914-99) was a Romanian-born cartoonist, probably best known for his work for The New Yorker |
| 2 | LEGENDS – two meanings |
| 3 | MONSARRAT – Nicholas Monsarrat wrote the play The Visitor (193?) (I’d never heard of The Visitor, but The Cruel Sea (1951) was extremely popular when I was growing up so I’m kicking myself for not spotting that MONSARRAT was the obvious possibility) |
| 4 | SUSS – S + USS; Lion Feuchtwanger wrote Jud Süß (1925) conventionally rendered in normal English as Jew Süss or Jew Suess but in crossword English as JEW SUSS (Sigh!) (for some reason the name Feuchtwanger doesn’t seem to have registered in my mind as the author of Jew Süss, and I stupidly put in SASS without stopping to think that there was a more obvious alternative!) |
| 5 | TOUCHSTONE – touch stone (vaguely cryptic); Touchstone is the clown in Shakespeare’s As You Like It |
| 6 | USHER – = a teacher; Edgar Allan Poe wrote the short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) |
| 7 | BERNICE – Bernice Rubens wrote Spring Sonata (1979) |
| 8 | RISEN – Flora Thompson wrote Lark Rise (1939), the first part of a trilogy which was published as Lark Rise to Candleford (1945) |
| 13 | STROGANOVA – Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon wrote Six Curtains for Stroganova (1945) (I’ve always meant to read A Bullet in the Ballet, the first in the series of which Six Curtains for Strogonova is the fourth and final novel, but sadly I’ve never got round to it, and I wasn’t even aware that the other three novels existed; the word “where” in the clue made me think the answer was going to be a place name) |
| 16 | AGAMEMNON – (among men a)* |
| 17 | EUMENIDES – EU + men + ides; the Greek Furies were called the Eumenides (the Kindly Ones) in an attempt to appease them |
| 19 | ORPHEUS – this wikipedia article explains how Orpheus was tragically retrospective |
| 21 | RALEIGH – RA + Leigh (Hunt); the poet could be Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552-1618) or Sir Walter Raleigh (1861-1922) |
| 22 | LOGES – a citation from the OED |
| 23 | ROSSI – soirs* (indirect anagrams are regarded as fair game in the TLS puzzle); the Italian conductor is presumably Mario Rossi (1902-92) |
| 25 | BERG – German for “mountain” (but “Austrian mountain” sounds better than “German mountain”); the composer is Alban Berg (1885-1935), whose Violin Concerto (a favourite work) I’ve chosen as my accompanying music (there’s a fine performance by Frederieke Saeijs starting here on YouTube |
I’m willing to give it a shot, although I don’t think I’ll do very well. A lot of our regular bloggers would be pretty hopeless. I don’t think the sort of person, if any, who regular solves this puzzle would be aware of this blog.
One of the reasons I enjoy the puzzle is that it reminds me of the old days of the Times crossword, when a modest knowledge of English literature was required – the sort you need to solve 10A (SLUGHORNS) and 22A (LUPERCAL) for example, neither of which had any subsidiary wordplay. It’s clear from others’ comments that many find that sort of thing totally unacceptable nowadays, and I can imagine the howls of derision if 10A, relying on knowledge of a particular Browning poem (Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came), appeared in a modern Times cryptic, though I’d almost be prepared to bet that something similar came up at some time between 1930 and (say)1970.
But, if you’re prepared to accept that Ximenes’s rules are going to be broken, then do give it a go. Its difficulty does vary quite a bit, so don’t be too put off if your first attempt is a miserable failure.
I ended up with two wrong, one (21A) a simple (and perhaps forgivable?) misspelling, and the other (23A) a piece of stupidity on my part, as I knew the reference perfectly well but missed a straightforward connection.
I was helped by knowing the quotations from Keats and Macaulay, both from favourite poems, but sadly I suspect that young boys (and girls) nowadays don’t get to read The Lays of Ancient Rome.