i Cryptic Crossword 4173 Wiglaf

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳⏳

A fairly tough challenge from Wiglaf this morning. But that’s great. The sun is shining, it’s already quite warm, and I was able for the first time this year to solve in the garden over an alfresco coffee (and mentally note the jobs in the garden that need doing. Later. Not today.)

There was a lot of humour in this puzzle. Some of it was approaching the Hoskinsesque. But always just the right side of the line, I thought, if that sort of thing matters. One such was the US bass-baritone, and another was the government minister. This latter was very neatly done, with an apt surface reading. Both of these clues also illustrate another feature of this crossword; the assumption of a pretty broad general knowledge. Most of the references I did know, but I did have to resort to Wikipedia to check that the British novelist whose name I had constructed from crossing letters and an anagram actually did exist. Indeed he did. I’ve not heard of him before, and haven’t read any of his books (obviously, or I would have heard of him). But I have seen the film The Cruel Sea.

Our Younger Solver could be forgiven for not knowing the abbreviation for a sixteenth of a pound in weight – on the grounds that this Older Solver who should have recognised it, completely failed to. It was my last one in, and went in with a loud groan.

The humour of the surface reading for 3d would likewise probably be lost on the young, but it’s very amusing, so that’s my Clue of the Day: “Failure to save old Mrs Sharples’ innards (7)”.

Here’s the link for the answers and explanations: https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/18/independent-10535-by-wiglaf/

i Cryptic Crossword 4172 by Eccles

Difficulty rating (out of five) ⌛⌛⌛

I agree with the folk on FifteenSquared (link below) that this was a little more challenging than Eccles usually is, but no less enjoyable. I usually start in the NW corner which looked daunting, so I moved East. Having not yet noted the setter’s identity, the clues seemed Phi-like, but the answers came quickly enough.

Reverting to the NW, Eccles’s craftiness was soon apparent in clues like those for LOCAL and KNUCKLES. I would mention more, but the list would be too long.

I found no theme or nina, nor any obscurities, and my knowledge of recent music is such that I had to check that there is or was indeed a band called SUEDE. However, I did find the clues for LAITIES and SKEWER sufficiently challenging to justify allocating one extra ⌛.

I considered the slick Spanish team at 22a as a candidate for Clue of the Day, but believe some solvers might find the Spanish word for ELEVEN to be below the belt. So instead I am suggesting a clue which threatened to take a long time until the penny dropped pleasingly with two crossing letters:

19a Permitted to be inspired by whimsical joy (8)

To FifteenSquared for all the wordplay and comments, including a discussion on singular and plural which I found a little arcane but interesting:

Independent 10,538 by Eccles

i Cryptic Crossword 4171 by Filbert

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳⏳⏳

Very tough today from Filbert, it would seem. I say it would seem, as this is one of those unfortunate days where I’m rushed off my feet, trying to cram three days’ worth of work into one as I’m off on a jolly the rest of the week. So below is your link to Fifteensquared where the reviews confirm what I guessed when I first glanced at the puzzle, hoping for something more like the late, lamented Dac. This appears to have defeated several of the regulars, so I find myself feeling justified at having ducked out at the start.

CoD? I’ll leave you to nominate!

All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from July 2020:

https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/29/independent-10544-by-filbert/

i Cryptic Crossword 4170 by Skinny

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳

Well, today was not only a theme I spotted, but one that is close to the heart. Did anyone not see it? I suspect not, as the albums scattered about the grid courtesy of the Fab Four are fairly well noted. As it turned out, despite this being a fairly gentle solve, for a moment it looked like I was going to come unstuck in the NW corner, so a couple of thematic items there were, needless to say, jotted in gratefully. As I’d spotted the correct definition of the “piece” pretty quickly anyway, no doubt I would have got there, but perhaps taken a smidgeon longer. There seems to be some debate on EMOS over on the other side, but as I have two in the house, it was a bit of a write-in. A great puzzle overall I thought.

CoD? I did like the very succinct 1d – “Country takeaway (4)”.

All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from July 2020:

https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/14/independent-10531-skinny/

i Cryptic Crossword 4169 Tees

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳

This was good fun. A smile crept onto my lips as I read the second clue, and became broader when moments later I got the German City and realised how it all worked. Within a few minutes I had a good quarter of the grid filled. Nicely done, and a thoroughly entertaining solve. I dare say that if you were not familiar with the song which was originally from Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, but which has taken on a new and brilliant life as Liverpool FC’s anthem, then you might have needed an extra egg-timer or two.

Only a couple of visits to the reference books were necessary – only for checking purposes, and then only because when I am blogging I feel a duty to make sure. These were to check on the city in China and the fabric. Both were very helpfully clued, and their respective crossing letters left little room for doubt.

Giving the four clues collectively forming the puns for the anthem doesn’t seem quite in the spirit of a clue of the day, so instead I nominate 4d, a long anagram which is very neatly done: “Unruly geezer once sober causes misery (8,7)”.

Here’s the link to Fifteensquared for the answers and explanations: https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/20/independent-10536-tees/

i Cryptic Crossword S0132 by Phi

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳⏳

I found this rather difficult by Phi’s standards and, although I’ve given it the same rating as yesterday’s from Serpent, I found it much harder to sustain my concentration today, with shamefully frequent recourse to electronic aids (none of which were needed yesterday) and an ultimate fail at the end on BILLED which was clued as ‘Apparently laid-up’ in other words ILL in BED – too hard for me!

Oh well, there were some nice bits dotted around, and I was quite pleased for the wordplay to lead me to the answers on words like SAGUARO which I’d not met before; a sure sign of good clue writing. I liked PROOFREAD, ARRIVEDERCI and the use of SOCHI in MASOCHISTIC, but CoD for me is this one:

8d Indication of failing powers to support juvenile criminal (6,9)

No theme; here’s the answers: www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/03/independent-10522-phi

i Cryptic Crossword 4168 by Serpent

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳⏳

Thoroughly brilliant from Serpent. He’s always very clever (and hard!), but this was out of the very top drawer. Loads of clues were excellent but a few were at crosswording artistry level I thought – the double deletion of INVETERATE, the use of Au and Or for ‘gold-plated’ in AUTHOR; the &Lits of CRUMPET and CHAPEL or indeed the excellent hidden GET OVER in 15a, which had a special resonance for me after smashing up my spine a couple of years ago. Then (and despite my still struggling to get my head fully around it) special mention should also be made for the clue for CATCH at 22a because of how it related to the theme. But top of the crop just has to be this one:

4d What is n, given n plus two could be twelve plus one? (6)

True, it’s a bit of trivia we might well have met in a comic in our schooldays perhaps, but how lovely to weave it into a clue like that; he’s not a Mathematics professor for nothing!

The theme was easy to spot – JOSEPH HELLER (top & bottom rows) had the foresight to give himself the same number of letters in his first and last names – but we also had CLOSING TIME and PICTURE THIS pleasingly positioned on the left and right edges and CATCH at 22. How perfect! That last is the only one here I’ve read and it remains one of my all time favourites. All that grid-filling was achieved with just one obscurity, PERSIFLAGE – which is one of those words that sounds vaguely familiar and I for one will be trying to shoehorn into the conversation at some point over the weekend.

I hope you enjoyed it too – apologies for all those near the beginning of your crosswording lives if it was too tricky; I’m sure that this is the sort of thing you’ll be lapping up in due course.

The answers:

www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/23/independent-10539-by-serpent

i Cryptic Crossword 4167 Klingsor

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳

If you solved yesterday’s cryptic, then 16ac should have come straight to mind. If this morning you needed to look at yesterday’s solution then you too will have had the answer come readily to you. One Capital, two crosswords, two clues, one misdirecting you to Japan and the far east, the other to Scandanavia, perhaps, or at least somewhere northern.

This was a delight to solve, with the polished surfaces and impeccable word-play of an accomplished setter. Plus some humour along the way.

I got a little stuck for a while in the bottom right corner. Rather lazily, I thought 20 ac was “outwit”. It matched the definition of Be smarter than; I couldn’t get the word-play (of course, because I was wrong) but thought I would go back at the end and sort it out. That meant I couldn’t get perform in theatre?, and still hadn’t got Oscar Wilde’s great character creation. I’m ashamed to confess that despite many incidences like this, I still fail to think that I might be wrong, instead believing that of course I am right, I just need to unpick the clue more carefully. Will I learn? Probably not. It was suspecting a pangram that put me right. With the J, the Z and the Q already there, I began to wonder…

There’s no Wagner today,  from this Wagnerian setter; but we did get the opportunity to click on YouTube for Smetana. Having visited Prague, I did know one Czech river, with its unlikely series of consonants, and it was the right one. I love the way that cryptics can lead you to explore in all directions

I loved the Deep blue, the Capital, One bores,  and the Artist. My Clue of the Day, however, is the crosswordy 11ac: “In due course, a clue for galleon? (3,2,4,4)”.

Here’s the link for the answers and explanations: https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/25/independent-10451-by-klingsor/

i Cryptic Crossword 4166 by Tees

Difficulty rating (out of five) ⌛⌛⌛

I really enjoyed this puzzle: Tees at his best with a sprinkling of easy clues to get you going, but many really challenging entries with fine surfaces, some of which had complicated but absolutely fair wordplay.

There was no theme or Nina, unless you count two of Santa’s reindeer (as according to an 1823 American poem of which I was informed by a diversion to Wikipedia), which were clued symmetrically in the SW and NE corners. They were both hitherto unknown, but I got the former from wordplay; the Jewish tribe in the latter was also unknown, but my first guess was lucky. The only other unknown was the plant part at 24a, which rang a very faint bell when I looked it up.

I enjoyed the good mix of clues. PRONOUN was entered from its cunning definition, missing the wordplay until I later visited FifteenSquared, to which a link appears below. However, whereas this clue required six cryptically defined letters to be removed, the THOROUGHFARE at 27a required three letters to be inserted. I was not deceived into believing that the capital in 4d was JAPAN’s. Top marks for surface go to 16d where a crafty definition for RACE is clued by a simple though not too obvious anagram. And I bet I am not alone in spotting the anagram for HAIRNET only after entering the answer from crossers and definition.

A great Penny-Drop Moment feeling the HOT-WATER BOTTLE at 3d and another brilliant surface at the COCONUT SHY in 1d, but for my Clue of the Day, I recall the PDM once I had identified the PM as N***H in 14a: ”Old PM with charisma making attractive point (8,5)”.

Please find all the wordplay and comments at:

https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/06/07/independent-on-sunday-1580-tees/

i Cryptic Crossword 4165 by Phi

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳

Phi will think that I’m stalking him – I’ve blogged the last couple of puzzles he has had in the i, as well as his latest Inquisitor. This may be a burden for him, but not for me, as I invariably enjoy his offerings. In fact, it was one of his which made me jump ship to the i. Anyway, a little tougher than usual for him today I thought, with quite a few clues that needed some mulling over. I was on the point of becoming badly unstuck at one point, but then noticed the symmetry in the left and right hand columns, which needless to say was a big help. A few I struggled to parse, notably 11ac, 18ac and 6d, but the answers were forthcoming enough. A satisfying solve, I thought.

CoD? I’ll go with 23ac – “American taxmen backtracking, with criminal groups about – they put the heat on (3,5)”.

All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from June 2024:

https://www.fifteensquared.net/2020/07/24/independent-10540-phi/