Excellent as ever from Dac but I’m not sure about 1d and 21.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | (TEACHER TRACKS)*,CH – CHARACTER SKETCH. |
| 9 | MOO’S,E |
| 10 | M,OMEN,TO,US |
| 11 | (TIES USA)* – AT ISSUE. |
| 12 | DR,OP’S,IN |
| 13 | ACTION – double def. |
| 14 | BAT,T(I)EST |
| 17 | TURN T,AIL |
| 19 | WELL,IE – as in “give it some wellie!”. |
| 22 | COMMEN(CE)D – I initially thought this was a container and contents type clue: a word for “begun” outside CE or CH. |
| 23 | READ,MIT – the University is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. |
| 24 | S(AL)TATION – in biology this means an abrupt evolutionary change. |
| 25 | TEASE – sounds like “teas”. |
| 26 | EARLY RETIREMENT – “Early to bed and early to rise, make a man healthy, wealthy and wise”. So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. |
| Down | |
| 1 | COMBATANT – don’t understand this one: “soldier” is the def and CO is “commander” but I can’t see how “flagrant disregard for lost” fits in. |
| 2 | hidden in “protAGONISTs” – a muscle which contracts while another relaxes. New to me, but got it when I had a couple of letters filled in. |
| 3 | (PRIVATE OR NHS AYE)* – AVERSION THERAPY. I liked the definition here: “Off-putting treatment”. |
| 4 | TAMPER – sounds like “Tampa”. |
| 5 | REME,DIAL – “engineers” is usually RE but here it’s REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers), a corps in the British Army. |
| 6 | KING OF THE CASTLE – I think I’ve heard “noise” used to refer to someone important but I couldn’t find it in the COED or Chambers Online. Maybe it’s in Chambers proper? |
| 7 | TOO,I in (SET)* – TOOTSIE. |
| 8 | H,NOSY (going up) – HYSON, new to me, a type of green tea. Easy enough to get from the wordplay. |
| 15 | TREATMENT – double definition. |
| 16 | WILDLIFE – not really sure about this one but if “Wild life” was pure wordplay it would give FILE. |
| 18 | RAMBLER – someone who rambles and a climbing plant, usually a rose. |
| 20 | LI(MEAD)E |
| 21 | BRUNEI – can’t account for UN here: “Sultanate, eastern one, coming under British control”. Also not sure what “control” is doing. |
| 22 | C,AS,TE[-st] |
Hi Neil
Re 1dn: B[L]ATANT could = flagrant – but can ‘L’ be an abbreviation for ‘lost’?
6dn: the expression is usually ‘big noise’, which is in Chambers.
L for lost could be as in games Won, Lost or Drawn.
21D I think is EI (eastern one) under B for British and RUN for control.
1d ‘L’ = ‘lost’ is confirmed in COED but not Chambers or Collins.
Exellent as usual from Dac, with the SW corner by far the trickiest for me. I agree with you about WILDLIFE. I also agree with Testy’s explanations, curiously BRUNEI was the first clue I understood and COMBATANT the last. L = lost is in dicts (e.g. COED) from league tables, but I’ve not seen it used very often in puzzles.
I’ve learnt to forgo my usual Collins as first choice reference in favour of the COED when checking Dac puzzles.
Dac is cool and the gang.