Comments on: Financial Times 13,190/Cinephile

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:26:15 +0000

Re #2:
LEYDEN is just LEY (line)+ DEN (study).
Leyden is the same as Leiden, it is just the old Dutch spelling of the word, so Leyden does refer to its University, the place where the Leyden Jar (Or Leiden Jar) came to life halfway the 18th century. Its inventor (I must say, one of the inventors, because a German scientist Von Kleist did the same thing independently from the Dutch) was Van Musschenbroek.
And the fun thing is:
before I came to the UK I lived in the Van Musschenbroekstraat in Utrecht for about
25 years ….
And to go back to the clue, the typical Araucarian thing is:
to link ‘study’ with ‘university with jar’, to obtain great surface reading.

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:27:53 +0000

12a, 25a I thought the line from The Go-between was “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Perhaps Cinephile is just doing it differently.

By: smiffy

smiffy — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:34:23 +0000

I had it pegged as ley + den. Ley lines are mystic/druidic(?) concepts. Not really sure of the details, but I think the theory is that they channel ancient “energy sources”. Is there a druid in the house who’d care to expound?

Den = “study (at university)”. I thought originally that “university” might be an additional/bonus definition, but it turns out that the seat of learning is Leiden (not Leyden) University.

By: verbose

verbose — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:33:07 +0000

21dn: Can you please explain how the clue works? I guessed Leyden from Leyden jars, but I can’t make sense of the entire clue. Thanks!

4dn: As far as I know, Lamartine didn’t write fables; perhaps Cinephile is confused between him and La Fontaine?