I managed to finish this but there are a number of answers that I still don’t fully understand. We usually only see this type of grid/theme combo from Brendan so it’s good to see someone else giving it a go. I don’t think we see Enigmatist often enough in the Guardian.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | HOMBRE – don’t know why though, apart from the definition. |
| 5 | DOG,WATCH – which is either from 4-6pm or 6-8pm. |
| 9 | EWE,G(g) in HERO – a “gee-gee” is a horse. |
| 10 | PARES<,H – the angel associated with light and purity. |
| 13 | IF in HI – the poem is, of course, by Kipling. HI or (H1) is a reference to a chessboard I think, although I couldn’t help noticing that the 1 across square in the grid also contains an “h”. |
| 14 | YET,OO in (THE)* – “canine” is deceiving here. |
| 17 | N in H,IBERIA – I liked this one. Took a while to twig that “Spain, Portugal” was IBERIA. |
| 18 | DOT,H(it) – another good one, with a well disguised definition (“does old”) and a smooth reading. |
| 24 | ICC in (t)HOUGH(t) |
| 25 | HE’S,PERUS(e) – aka, Venus. |
| 26 | ENMESH – is this just a cryptic def or is there more going on? |
| Down | |
| 4 | EVELYN – another one I can’t work out, apart from the fact that Evelyn is both a man and woman’s name. |
| 5 | DROP ONE’S AITCHES – those four H’s in the grid just leap out at you after solving this one. Dithered a while over the ONE’S/YOUR dilemma but should have remembered that it’s almost always “ONE’S”. |
| 7 | A,GREE(k) – I liked “donating” to indicate the removal of the “k”. |
| 8 | TATI< in CAP,ACE |
| 15 | ORDER FOR M – I spent a while trying to think of a phrase with “Bond” in it. |
| 16 | ANTEATER – is this right? I assumed it was something to do with soldier ants. |
| 19 | CRECHE – another one where the wordplay is lost on me. |
| 22 | hidden in “wAGE Slave”. |
1ac BR=bedroom HOME=in; 26ac just cryptic def; 5dn what about the other 16?!; 4dn ref EVENLY; 19 drunk pron of cress.
Hope that helps!
The other 16 (in left and right grid-cols) helped me with my last couple of across clues. Just to clarify: “pron” = pronunciation
10 How did you get Paresh? Wouldn’t that have messed up your 6 and 8 down?
Oh you mean Seraph, scrub that!
A nice puzzle. I struggled with 2d (OGEE) which I had not heard of and 6d (GOSSAMER) and I still do not understand the cryptic part of it – any explanation?
GOSS+AMER[ican] where GOSS turns out to be “white china vessels and trinkets…” named after WH Goss [ref. Chambers]. No, didn’t know this — but the other cryptic part and the def were pretty clear so… used The Big Red Book.
A lot of ‘is this right?’ going on here!
I think solvers ought to be able to have confidence in their answers once they’ve solved a clue.
It’s not so much a question of confidence as of understanding the cryptic part. You can often be confident that a clue’s solution is correct from just the definition part and checking letters but still not understand the cryptic bit. That’s the whole point of this blog – to explain clues where they may be obscure!