Solving time: 35 mins
It would be fair to say that I wasn’t firing on all cylinders when solving this puzzle. The clearest evidence was the five minutes I wasted trying to find an alternative to ORCADIAN at 8ac because I didn’t know an island called ‘Orcadia’ and couldn’t see the wordplay. It didn’t help that I couldn’t link the eight special answers (given in bold), though – it turns out that they are all not chickens, oranges, dogs, cars or constellations but book publishers. Well done if you spotted that!
I thought some of the clues here were very good.
* = anagram, “X” = sounds like ‘X’. Clues are presented in normal grid order.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | CROSS + OVER |
| 6 | COP + T (middle letter of ‘paintings’) |
| 8 | ORCADIAN; ORCA, + (AND)* around I – meaning ‘to do with the Orkneys’, as I eventually realised. The anagram indication ‘and cuckoo’ is very subtle; it’s a good job I dodn’t think of the ‘ani’, a type of cuckoo, or I would have been convinced that it formed part of the wordplay. |
| 9 | VIRAGO; VI(R)A + GO |
| 10 | VIKING, from VIEWING – not quite convinced by E,W for ‘two wings’. |
| 11 | AIRS TRIP – again very well worded. |
| 12 | BANTAM; rev. of NAB, + TAM |
| 15 | EXIGENCY; X,C separately in (EYEING)* – another lovely anagram indicator (‘eyeing rocks’). |
| 16 | ATYPICAL; (I ACT PLAY)* – fantastic anagram. |
| 19 | NEWB[y] + I.E. – the travel writer is Eric Newby. |
| 21 | BACCARAT; BAC[k] + CAR + A + T |
| 22 | PINION; “PINNY ON” |
| 24 | DIK-DIK; 2 x DI[c]K – ‘hitched’ in the sense of ‘joined’, I suppose. |
| 25 | MANDARIN; (DARN)* in MA (= Massachussetts) + IN. |
| 26 | BLUR[b] – ‘to blur’ = ‘to dull’, in the sense of a memory. |
| 27 | RURAL DEAN; (AND A RULER)* – very well-disguised anagram. |
| Down | |
|---|---|
| 1 | CORGI; COR + G,I |
| 2 | ON A DIET; ON (= ‘taking place’) + A[nswer] + DIET (= ‘legislative assembly’) |
| 3 | S[o]WING |
| 4 | VINTAGE; (N + TAG) in VIE |
| 5 | RE + VERSION – I didn’t have VIRAGO in place at 9ac and all I could see here was ‘recursion’. |
| 6 | CUR-ETTE – a medical scraper. |
| 7 | PAGLIACCI; rev, of GAP, + (C[e]CILIA)* |
| 13 | ACTUARIAL; A, + A (= ‘note’) in (RAIL CUT)* |
| 14 | MUC(K,R,A)KER |
| 17 | PICADOR; (DROP)* around I.C.A. – I think the ICA is the Institute of Contemporary Arts. |
| 18 | LAT(I’M)ER – ‘one is’ = ‘I am’. |
| 20 | WAN + NAB + E – ‘white collar’ is brilliantly worked in here for WAN + NAB. |
| 22 | P(EN)AL |
| 23 | ORION; RIO in rev. of ON |
A very nice theme, I thought – I got PICADOR first (horsemen? bullfighters?) and then ORION (um, hunters?)… I think I managed to convince myself that a CORGI could be a hunting dog before working out the publishers link.
WANNABE and NEWBIE crossing was quite funny, I thought, and I quite agree that the former was an excellent clue.
I found this quite hard going and very satisfying to finish. My first was VIRAGO, which should have been a giveaway, but the second was VINTAGE, a publisher I hadn’t heard of [likewise MANDARIN] so it took a while for the penny to drop, particularly as the theme was so unusual. [To begin with, when I got 26, I thought they might be bands – then noticed the ‘dull’.]
I agree about the anagrams in 15, 16 and 27 – brilliant. [I remembered what I called at the time one of the best anagram clues I’d ever seen in an FT crossword a couple of months ago: ‘a climber of rocks in Devon {10}] I missed the ‘and cuckoo’, though, although that was the first answer I put in.
I thought 10 across was clever and have no problem with East and West wings.
Mhl: thanks for that. I had fun imagining the Queen ‘riding to corgis’. 🙂
I thought that this was way too hard even for a prize crossword. My girlfriend and I managed half a dozen answers despite giving it several hours over three days.
And looking at the answers now, I don’t find I’m kicking myself over many. Obscure references and poor definitions. Not for me.
A very satisfying crossword with some clever clues which reminded me of the much lamented Bunthorne. Corgi was my first non definition answer and I wasted ages looking for dogs.