Comments on: Financial Times 13,705 by Cincinnus

By: Pete Maclean

Pete Maclean — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:31:02 +0000

I had the same experience with HIGHTAIL IT and STARCH. And also with ACRE. I was perhaps not so taken with UNSOUGHT just because I happen to know almost nothing about the Scarlet Pimpernel.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 05:23:56 +0000

Many thanks Pete & Cincinnus.

This was wonderful and a marvellous example of why I like doing Crosswords.

Although UNSOUGHT, HIGHTAIL IT and STARCH now seem obvious, they each gave me a kick when I sussed them out.

I particularly liked the allusion to the Scarlet Pimp.

By: Sil van den Hoek

Sil van den Hoek — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 23:17:29 +0000

Thanks Pete.
Agree with your highlights (APPENDICES [what a fine surface], FADO and DETOURS [almost &Littish]). For us, GERMANE (19d) was another clue that stood out, because one can look at it in different ways (which we did before cracking it!).

I look at 2d as the upcoming ‘ossa’ (ASSO) forming the basis for PIC, so coming under PIC as a kind of support.

Looking at your blog, I am not sure whether you saw the right parsing of 12ac (TARTARUS). ‘Tartar’ should be seen as one ‘Tar’ plus another one. As ‘salt’ is a word for sailor, we have here two ‘salts’.