Two unknown words and one unknown spelling made this a tougher challenge for your faithful correspondents. One clue we haven’t successfully parsed.
ACROSS
4. POUND triple definition.
6. HE I NOUS
8. CONNIVER ‘inn’ backwards inside cover
9. H(UM)OUR
10. LA TEST
11. BO(LONE)Y spent a long time on this convinced that ‘baloney’ was the only way to spell it, turns out that’s a load of boloney
12. C LASS WILL TELL as in William Tell, El loves clues like this
16. CUBICLE cub, then (lice)*
18. ALBAN Y St Alban of St Albans fame
20. GRILLE e.g. backwards around rill. This one got all up in ours and took a while to solve
21. ECHIDNAS (chased in)*. A new word for us, ‘an Australian toothless, spiny, egg-laying, burrowing monotreme’, apparently
22. BA(SKIN)G
23. R(ACE)D
DOWN
1. NU(is)ANCE
2. WIT HAL
3. COMMENCE ‘commerce’ with an ‘n’ rather than an ‘r’
4. PROSAIC ‘o’ in (Paris)*
5. DE(VOTE)S
6. HARD-BOILED EGG Cryptic definition
7. STUD Y and why not?
13. A R B(A)LEST another unfamiliar one, it means ‘a crossbow’
14. L(E)ATHER
15. LANYARD unsure of the parsing of this: ‘One going over a river secured by light line’
16. CA< ROB
17. C RED IT
19. BOD ICE
I think it may be the alternative spelling LANIARD with I A R in ‘land’ = light.
I think the clue is referring to the River Yar which flows into The Solent at Yarmouth, Isle of Wight. So I would go with LAN(YAR)D and agree that ‘land’ is defined by light (alight).
I’d LANYARD pencilled in without full understanding, then, going back to the clue, the LANIARD alternative occurred. We’ll not know till Sun, but “One going over a river” seems to be just a little bit more than Yar.
Alternative spellings are always problematic and must be precisely clued. Duncan’s parsing doesn’t seem to account for the “One”.
I’m surprised LANIARD caused so much of a problem. NMS got it right of course. ECHIDNA will become familiar over time, usuallly in the singular form as an anagram of CHAINED.
Thanks for the explanations everybody! I guess, for office dwellers like me, ‘lanyard’ seems so humdrum and is something we write almost every day, so ‘laniard’ feels even more alien than it should, like a glamorous alter ego.
Thanks, Handel.
By the way, you missed the C (about) at the end of 4dn.
Didn’t know conniver was a word however did well and almost finished