TLS 855 – let’s try again!

Author   linxitPosted on Categories Other Crosswords
Another one on the easy side for the TLS, with a larger number of straight cryptics than usual. There were about half a dozen left at the end that I had to look up though, as well as a few that went in as educated guesses rather than from certain knowledge.

Across
1 FREEHAND – FREE (unpaid) + HAND (worker)
6 RUNNER – The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) by Alan Sillitoe. An author I’ve never read but have been meaning to for years.
9 UBU ROI – first letters of Up Brightly Unerringly Reflecting Old Intrigues, which more or less also sums up the plot. 1896 play by Alfred Jarry, an easy one for me as it was performed by the drama class at school. They must have liked plays involving people whose names started with U, as the only other one I can remember them doing is Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
10 NATIVITY – cryptic definition.
11 TRIPLANE – guessed from crossing letters. I couldn’t find the quote on Google.
12 ISRAEL – Israel Hands was the mutinous ship’s mate on the Hispaniola in Treasure Island.
13 RAIDS – I had to look this one up.
14 LOCATELLI – LOCATE + ILL reversed. This must be Pietro Locatelli (1695-1764), Italian composer and violinist. The only one I’ve heard of is a chef.
17 ALMSHOUSE – cryptic definition, but see kevingregg’s comment for an explanation.
19 EPICS – (spice)*. Pretty lame.
22 INGRAM – hidden in “footlING RAMblings”. There’s a Colonel Ingram in The Iron Heel by Jack London. Don’t know that he’d have appreciated the surface reading much!
23 OMELETTE – David as in Elizabeth David, the French cookbook authoress. Ref. the saying: You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs (sans casser des oeufs).
24 TO AUTUMN – you know the one: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness etc.
25 GUITAR – two of the most well-known classical guitarists.
26 COHERE – double definition?
27 RASSELAS – a book by Samuel Johnson in which the protagonist, Prince Rasselas of Abissinia, travels away from the valley of his birth in search of happiness. One I knew from an earlier TLS puzzle.

Down
2 ROBERTA – one of E. Nesbit’s Railway Children.
3 EURIPIDES – Greek playwright who was killed by the king’s hunting dogs while walking in the woods.
4 ANIMAL – (mail an)*, ref. Animal Farm.
5 DANGEROUS CORNER – 1932 play by J. B. Priestley.
6 RATTIGAN – guessed from crossing letters. Couldn’t figure out why. See Tony Sever’s comment below.
7 NAIPAUL – N + A1 + PAUL. V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Another author I’ve been meaning to get around to but haven’t.
8 ROYALTIES – ROYAL + TIES
13 REALISTIC – Jorge Luis Borges is one of the chief exponents of magic realism, along with other South American authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allendes, Carlos Fuentes etc. Not that it’s a field restricted to South Americans, but they do seem to dominate it in my mind.
15 EXPLETIVE – guessed this from crossing letters, but had to look it up to check.
16 TO A MOUSE – “Wee sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie…” Why “unit” though?
18 MCGRATH – 1983 play by John McGrath: The Power of Women; or, Up the Acropolis.
20 CITHARA – an ancient Greek two-stringed lyre, so an educated guess.
21 VERGES – took me ages to dig this guy out. A colleague of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing.

4 comments on “TLS 855 – let’s try again!”

  1. 20 minutes to get everything but 6d and 12ac, and I don’t know how long to get them. Somehow came up with RATTIGAN on the basis of the R,T, & A, without understanding the Lawrence and Shaw references, and then guessed ISRAEL because I couldn’t guess anything more likely-sounding.
    I suspect 17 was a reference to Trollope’s “The Warden”, where the plot involves the question of who will become the new warden of Hiram’s Hospital, the Barchester almshouse.
  2. 10:32 (1 wrong): I was feeling tired and rashly put MAGRATH instead of MCGRATH on the tenuous basis that that was how one of the provosts of my old college spelled his name.

    11A (TRIPLANE) is a citation from the OED, as is 16D (EXPLETIVE).

    I came to the same conclusion as kevingregg about 17A.

    The reference in 6D is to Terence Rattigan’s play Ross (Shaw being the name T. E. Lawrence adopted when he joined the Royal Tank Corps in 1923).

    I suspect the word “unit” in 16D ( Burns unit = TO A MOUSE) is nothing more than an attempt at a good surface reading, but unfortunately at the expense of a decent indication of the answer required.

    I did Much Ado About Nothing for Eng. Lit. O-level, so 21D was an easy win 🙂

    A minor detail: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner dates from 1959 rather than 1969.

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