We had an excellent night out in London last night with bloggers from here and Pete Biddlecombe’s Times for the Times blog, Tony Sever (RTC2) and a few setters too. A possible side-effect is that this puzzle took me over half an hour this morning! Or maybe it’s quite tough, I can’t really tell.
Across
10 TAI(l),PAN – The taipan is a large Australian snake, and the most venomous land animal in the world.
11 UNDER(TA)KINGS – “men in suits” = kings (i.e. in a pack of cards) is good.
14 DOGS,BODY – not keen on the definition here. Servant maybe, but surely not slave…
17 MY,O=round,SO,’TIS [last six letters not a jumble of “so it is” as I first thought; see comments] – I didn’t know this but the wordplay’s easy enough (or not!). I looked it up afterwards – it’s the name of the forget-me-not genus.
20 BRIDGE,TR(ILE)Y – an artist I was familiar with as we had a lesson about her in Art at school, and an exercise to produce our own works of op art.
24 NI(HI)L,IS,(sal)T – ought (alternative spelling of aught) = nought = nil.
26 TIP OFF – got this from the definition (alert), but don’t understand the wordplay. [TIP=crown, OFF=high, as in rotten meat. See comments.]
Down
3 SADDUCEES (“sad, you seize”) – the homophone bit only works if you make it the whole word, otherwise the second D isn’t accounted for. Anyway, the Sadducees were the rivals of the better-known Pharisees.
5 COLORADO,SPRINGS – American city located close to Pikes Peak, at the eastern edge of the Rockies.
6 L,ETH(the*),ARGY – L = Lambert is OK, as a lambert is unit of illumination with that abbreviation.
7 (go)BLIN,I – what the Russians spread caviar on.
15 BELLY,FLOP – I really liked this clue, don’t know why.
16 S,T,G(E)ORGE
21 DEFOE – wordplay seems to indicate DEFEO (E,F inside OED, all rev). Am I missing something? [Yes, I was. See comments]
22 A,SIF(t) – last one I got (but only because the second last was 26a so I didn’t have the F, and was thinking of the other sort of riddle.
You are right about 21d – the wordplay should give ‘DEFEO’ as the answer.
26a – I read this as TIP (= crown) + OFF (= high as in ‘he is off his head’)
Did the paper version today being in London, which is a nice change. And in fact probably here longer than planned due to Heathrow weather.
Great time last night.. thanks Peter!
I agree about TIP OFF i don’t the 2nd way to get OFF (no pun intended).
As for DEFOE — it’s EF,OED with D moved from “back to front”
DEFOE works if you take ‘back to front’ literally – put the last letter first, so OED becomes DOE, not DEO.
I liked BELLY FLOP too. Agree this was tough, and I probably didn’t have time to drink as much as you last night! I couldn’t get SADDUCCEES at all.
Oops, crossed with you there, Ilan. NB ‘high’ = ‘off’ is not about drugs, it’s about meat which is past its sell-by date.
Thanks to Ilan and Mick for explaining DEFOE – I knew I was missing something! TIP OFF works for me too now – I just couldn’t see how off = high before.
I read 17A as MY + O (= round) + SO + ‘TIS rather than MY + (SOITIS)*
And of course you’re right, Charybdis! I think I’d better go and fix that. Anagrams usually have the same set of letters as the anagram fodder…
I Liked ‘men in suits’ = kings