I made the mistake of starting this puzzle when I was feeling rather tired. I’d hoped that it might wake me up, but after I few minutes I found I was actually a lot more tired than I’d thought and that my brain seemed to have seized up – to such an extent that it took me around 15 minutes (off and on) to remember the name of Squire Western in Tom Jones (20A), and I couldn’t remember Squire Allworthy at all!
In the end I ran out of time after making heavy weather of the SE corner. I’d delayed putting in ASHLEY (a guess) for 2D until the last minute, and it was only after I’d done so and my 30-minute time limit had expired, that I realised to my annoyance that the answer to 1A was obviously going to be BAINBRIDGE, and (after a brief thought) that 5D was going to be DANAIDS (I wrongly assumed that they were the offspring of Danaë, but it was the right answer so what the heck).
Far worse was revealed when I went back to the remaining two unsolved clues, 26A and 16D. Still unable to think of anything sensible that would fit 26A, I finally did what I should have done earlier and applied one of the oldest rules in crossword-solving: if all else fails, check the crossing answers. Almost immediately I realised that I’d made a howler with 12D and put in ACCUSATION rather than the obvious ACCUSATIVE. Of course the V immediately gave me VAULTS for 26A; and after some further thought I reckoned that 16D might just be APULEIUS (mainly because it fitted), and decided to take a chance with it.
So all correct in the end – but 5 points down under Championship conditions (or 6 if SQUIRELIKE turns out to be wrong for 20A).
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | BAINBRIDGE – A Quiet Life is a novel by Dame Beryl Bainbridge, who was awarded the DBE in 2000 |
| 9 | ROXANE – OX (= steer) in (near)*; Roxane is the sultan Amurat’s favourite in Jean Racine’s Bajazet (1672), where she comes to a sticky end along with various other characters (there’s also an unrelated opera Bajazet (1735) by Antonio Vivaldi, but I’m afraid I’ve never seen either work) |
| 10 | SHERIDAN – Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the author of The Rivals (1775) and The Critic, or A Tragedy Rehearsed (1779) |
| 11 | ASCRIBED – A + SCRIBE + D |
| 12 | AYRE – (year)*; and old form of “air” = a tune or melody (so “song” is perhaps unnecessarily specific) |
| 13 | PADEREWSKI – (Wakes pride)*; Ignace Paderewski (1860-1941) is probably better known as a pianist than as a composer (he was also prime minister of Poland from January to December 1919) – you can see him playing his Minuet in G (and the 1st movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata) on Youtube |
| 15 | CHANTIE – CH + ANT + IE; another form of “shanty” = a song |
| 17 | ICEBERG – this clue seems to be the wrong way round as Clive Cussler wrote Iceberg in 1975 followed by Raise the Titanic! in 1976; since only a small part of an iceberg is above water, there’s more to it than meets the eye |
| 20 | SQUIRELIKE (?) – in Henry Fielding’s novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Tom’s mother turns out to be the sister of Squire Allworthy, who is thus his uncle, and Tom marries Sophia Western, the daughter of Squire Western, who thus becomes his father-in-law (I’m not entirely sure of SQUIRELIKE as I feel the answer ought to be a noun rather than an adjective, but I can’t come up with anything better) |
| 21 | LEAR – LEA + R; I assume that the poet is Edward Lear (1812-88), famous for his limericks and nonsense verse |
| 23 | THEODORE – (the rodeo)*; Théodore (1645), a tragedy by Pierre Corneille, tells of a martyred Christian princess of Antioch |
| 25 | RAISONNE – as in catalogue raisonné |
| 26 | VAULTS – another citation from the OED (easy to guess as long as you haven’t screwed up the first letter!) |
| 27 | ANTINOMIAN – (anoint main)* |
| Down | |
| 2 | ASHLEY – in Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel (1951), the protagonist Philip Ashley marries his cousin Rachel (widow of his cousin Ambrose) |
| 3 | NORTHERN – The Northern Light (1958) is a novel by A.J. Cronin |
| 4 | REDEMPTIVE – another citation from the OED |
| 5 | DANAIDS – these turn out to be the 50 daughters of Danaus of Argos (and not as I’d imagined of Danaë, who was the mother of Perseus) who married the 50 sons of Aegyptus and (apart from Hypermnestra, wife of Lynceus) at their father’s command murdered their husbands on their wedding night, and were punished in Hades by having to draw water from a deep well, using sieves, for eternity |
| 6 | ERIC – two meanings: the blood fine paid by a murderer to his victim’s family in old Irish law; |
| 7 | BARBUSSE – BUSS (= kiss) in BARE; Henri Barbusse (1873-1935) was a French novelist |
| 8 | DEAD RINGER – Quasimodo is the deformed bell-ringer in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) |
| 12 | ACCUSATIVE – a grammatical case (this clue sounds like an old chestnut, making missing it even more inexcusable) |
| 14 | RECREATION – William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling, wrote Recreations with the Muses (1637) |
| 16 | APULEIUS – the author of the Latin novel The Golden Ass (2nd Century) (I was trying to think of a far later author, and it was only when I had the second U in place that I considered Apuleius as a possibility – and I wasn’t too sure of him even then!) |
| 18 | BALLROOM – Ninette de Valois staged the ballet The Haunted Ballroom in 1934: it’s remembered nowadays mainly because of Geoffrey Toye’s music and because it gave Margot Fonteyn her first solo rôle with the Vic-Wells Ballet |
| 19 | DIDEROT – Denis Diderot wrote Pensées philosophiques (1746), Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748) and Le Fils naturel (1757) |
| 22 | AMANDA – in Sir John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger (1696), Amanda is married to Loveless and is pursued by Worthy (the use of lower case letters for proper names in this way would be disallowed in the daily Times cryptic but is normal in the TLS puzzle) |
| 24 | OSSA – two meanings: bones; a mountain in Thessaly, familiar from the phrase “to pile Pelion on Ossa” |
Finally the unresolved clue (20A from TLS Puzzle No. 812):
Scottish king becomes Hitler for Huddersfield (7) = MALCOLM
The “Scottish king” part is straightforward, but while I can connect MALCOLM with Huddersfield, the “Hitler” part is a mystery (or at least I’ve nothing to back up any ideas I’ve had). Any thoughts?
After a bit of Googling I’m come up with a very tentative link for the clue from TLS812 – Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, a 1965 play by David Halliwell, in which Malcolm is a parallel for Hitler. I think he is also a Huddersfield College of Arts student (the synopsis I read just said “North of England” but Halliwell studied at Huddersfield himself).
You’re quite right about one good look-up, as I can testify from recent experience (but I’ll leave that until next week).
Many thanks for coming up with Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. This review confirms that Malcolm was at Huddersfield Art College, so I’m pretty sure you’ve nailed it.
The connection I made between Malcolm and Huddersfield was Sir Malcolm Sargent’s association with the Huddersfield Choral Society; but I suspect it’s very far from the case that its members regarded him as a “Hitler”.
Yet again I didn’t know 1 across – I don’t think I’ve got one yet – whic always makes things harder.
I have to admit thoroughly enjoying the Quasimodo joke.