Solving time: 30:00 (3 wrong)
There are times when I feel I’m completely losing my grip. With A—A-Y-S- in place, I failed to see APOCALYPSE, despite wondering at one point whether the “white horseman” might be the rider of the white horse in the Book of Revelations. If I’d got that, then the missing O would quickly have given me ZOLA – which should have been an easy win given my interest in art history. But even if I’d got those two right, I’d still have got the puzzle wrong as I spelled CARL PETERSON’s first name with a K.
I’ve taken a different tack this week and omitted answers that I’ve considered too obvious to need explanation. If that leaves anyone mystified, do let me know.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | EPHEMERIST – I assume this clue refers to Vladimir Nabokov’s secondary career as an entomologist |
| 6 | EAST – the name of one of Tom Brown’s schoolfellows in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) |
| 10 | ZOLA – Émile Zola wrote L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece) (1886), based loosely on the life of Paul Cézanne whom he grew up with, followed by L’Argent (Money) (1891) (When I first read the clue, I immediately thought of AMIS because of Martin Amis’s novel Money (1984), but I then drew a blank with “the masterpiece”. Unfortunately this seemed to addle my brain so that I stupidly missed ZOLA, whose L’Œuvre I knew about from my art history studies.) |
| 17 | LOYAL – Thomas Southerne wrote The Persian Prince, or the Loyal Brother (1682) |
| 18 | PAUL’S – a slightly cheeky clue since the answer isn’t the name of a saint as such but refers to Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Old St Paul’s (1861) (I think that this is just about acceptable, but that 8D definitely isn’t) |
| 25 | PROTESTANT – I assume this clue refers to the song The Vicar of Bray in which the vicar changes his political and religious allegiance to keep in step with the reigning monarch |
| Down | |
| 2 | HOLY – Holy Pictures (1983) was Clare Boylan’s first novel |
| 4 | RAREE – Stephen College wrote A Raree Show, or, The True Protestant Procession: a New Ballad to the Tune of the Northumberland Man (1681) |
| 7 | APOCALYPSE – J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece edited the anthologies The New Apocalypse (1939) and The White Horseman (1941) |
| 8 | TRAVELLER’S – Freya Stark wrote Traveller’s Prelude (1950), but the clue clearly leads to TRAVELLER (without an apostrophe S) |
| 11 | CARL PETERSON – Sapper (H. C. McNeile) has Bulldog Drummond dispatch his arch-enemy Peterson in his fourth novel The Final Count (1926) (I spent ages trying to remember Peterson’s first name. Initially, with just the R in place, all I could think of was LARS, but then I remembered that of course it was KARL. Wrong!) |
| 13 | CAPPADOCIA – the reference is to a famous (though now discredited) excerpt from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Chapter 23, Part 5) which you can find here (search for “George”) |
| 14 | PETULENGRO – (long repute)*; Jasper Petulengro is the principal gypsy character in George Borrow’s Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857) |
| 21 | TUTOR – a citation from the OED |
| 23 | OTIS – hidden in “cypriOT ISlands” (no extraneous words for once!); Hiram B. Otis is an American ambassador in Oscar Wilde’s novella The Canterville Ghost (1887) |
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