I thought this was going to be another success story. I solved 15 clues on my first run-through (and correctly guessed another, but didn’t dare put it in), and had three-quarters of the puzzle finished in around 12 minutes, leaving me with just the SW corner, which looked promising as I had the two left-most down answers in place. But I hit the buffers and failed to solve any of the remaining five clues within the half-hour.
After 30 minutes, I looked up the L.P. Hartley title at 13D: I should have remembered, or at least guessed, BRICKFIELD, but I could only think of BRICKYARDS. That didn’t help, so next I looked up the Craig Thomas title at 28A: I’d have needed all the crossing letters to have guessed EMERALD. That didn’t help either, so I then resorted to Bradford for possible answers to 23D, found OMAHA and checked it in the (online) OED. With all the crossing letters in place, I vaguely remembered FASTOLFE at 22A (though I couldn’t think where he came from). And finally I realised to my annoyance that the answer to 26A was BENGALESE, which I should have thought of all along, and which might have allowed me to clean up the whole corner.
My unresolved clue this week is 7D in this puzzle:
Dutch exponent of the flute (7) = LEOPOLD
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | MARRYAT – (a martyr)*; Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) is best known for writing Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), whose eponymous hero is well loved by crossword setters |
| 5 | HARTLEY – the novelist L.P. Hartley (1895-1972) is almost invariably referred to with his initials rather than either of his forenames (LP = old record) |
| 9 | DEMON – Hubert Selby wrote The Demon (1976) |
| 10 | OBNOXIOUS – citation from the OED |
| 11 | LIADOV – hidden in “the iLIAD OVerture and variations”; the Russian composer Anatoly Konstantinovich Liadov (1855-1914) is probably best remembered for his tone poems Kikimora and The Enchanted Lake, and for not writing the music for The Firebird for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes |
| 12 | PRAETORS – another citation from the OED |
| 14 | TUTTI – the Italian for “all”, used in a musical context to indicate that the performers join in en masse |
| 15 | RHAPSODIC – Franz Liszt wrote a set of 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846-53) |
| 18 | NIETZSCHE – (zen ethics)*; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) |
| 20 | TATUM – Art Tatum (1909-56) was trained as a classical pianist but became the greatest jazz pianist of all time (well, that’s my view anyway) – you can hear him playing his arrangement of Tea for Two here |
| 22 | FASTOLFE – a character in Shakepeare’s King Henry VI, Part 1, to whom Talbot says “I vow’d, base knight, when I did meet thee next, / To tear the garter from thy craven’s leg, [Plucking it off] / Which I have done, …” (I don’t think I’ve ever seen the play on stage, but I’ve heard it on the radio and seen it on TV, though some time ago in both cases) |
| 24 | FRERON – hidden in “the société du cofFRE RONde”; Élie Fréron (1719-76) is remembered now mainly for his opposition to the Enlightenment in general and Voltaire in particular |
| 26 | BENGALESE – John Masters wrote Nightrunners of Bengal (1951) (I was annoyed to miss this one, as I thought of the title instantly once I realised that BENGALESE would fit) |
| 27 | SOUTH – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s first book was Courrier sud (Southern Mail) (1929) |
| 28 | EMERALD – Craig Thomas (writing under the name David Grant) wrote Emerald Decision (1980) (I’d probably have guessed this correctly if I’d had all the crossing letters, but not otherwise) |
| 29 | UNDINES – according to Paracelsus, an undine (a female water spirit) can acquire a soul by marrying a mortal man and bearing his child (those familiar with Frederick Ashton’s ballet Ondine will perhaps be more used to the alternative spelling) |
| Down | |
| 1 | MIDDLETON – MIDDLE + TON; the poet Christopher Middleton wrote Serpentine (1984/5) |
| 2 | RAMPART – RAM + PART |
| 3 | YANKOWITZ – Susan Yankowitz won a “Most Promising Playwright” Drama Desk Award in 1969 for her play Terminal |
| 4 | TROY – Sergeant Troy is a character in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) |
| 5 | HAND-REARED – Brian Aldiss wrote The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) |
| 6 | ROXIE – Roxie Hart is the showgirl accused of murder in Maurine Watkins’s play Chicago (1926) and, more famously nowadays, in the Kander and Ebb musical Chicago (1975); the play was also the basis for the film Roxie Hart (1942) starring Ginger Rogers |
| 7 | LEOPOLD – I’ve a feeling I’m missing something obvious here, but I don’t understand this clue (given above): there’s a Dutch poet Jan Hendrik Leopold (1865-1925), but I haven’t been able to connect him to anything fluty; and there’s Leopold Hoffman (1738-93) who wrote several flute concertos, but he was Austrian; or (given that we have Molly Bloom at 8D) perhaps there’s a reference to Leopold Bloom? |
| 8 | YESES – “Irish Penelope” is Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose final soliloquy ends in an orgasmic sequence of yeses |
| 13 | BRICKFIELD – L.P. Hartley wrote The Brickfield (1964) |
| 16 | SATIRISED – (Raised its)* |
| 17 | COMANCHES – Larry McMurtry wrote Comanche Moon (1997) |
| 19 | ESSENCE – Aldous Huxley wrote Ape and Essence (1948) |
| 21 | TARQUIN – TAR + QUIN; the name of two of the seven legendary Kings of Rome |
| 22 | FABLE – hidden in “oF A BLEssing” (no unused words for once!) |
| 23 | OMAHA – yet another citation from the OED (one of the possibilities I considered for 28A was ELEGANT, which would have given me the final A, but I still couldn’t think of OMAHA – though I should have done!) |
| 25 | JEHU – defined in Chambers (2003) as “any fast and furious coachman or driver”, from the King of Israel noted for driving his chariot furiously (see 2 Kings 9:20); when I was young (in less politically correct times) there was a song called The Darkie Sunday School which contained the verse “Jehu had a chariot, 96 horsepower, / He drove it round the Holy Land at 100 miles an hour; / But he had to drive more carefully when passing through Jezreel / ‘Cos little bits of Jezebel got tangled in the wheel.” (“Toadlike” is of course a reference to Toad from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, another furious driver) |
I also guessed at 7dn LEOPOLD, no luck in finding a Dutch composer or musician of that name though. 5ac and 13dn were well timed for me, as I was reading The Go-Between at the time, and had looked at the list of his other books inside the front cover.
NB Typo at 3dn, should start with a Y.
Thanks – I’ve corrected YANKOWITZ at 3dn. (I must have had the tennis player in mind for a moment :-).