Independent 7,300 by Dac

by

A mixed one for me, having raced through all but three clues in mere minutes, to find myself completely stumped on 10, 25 and 28. I’ll blame the fact that today’s post has necessarily been prepared in quite a hasty fashion. As a curious side-note, it seems my blogging days have so far coincided with Independent cryptic puzzle numbers 7,000, 7,100, 7,200 and now 7,300.

*=anag, []=dropped, <=reversed, hom=homophone, cd=cryptic definition, dd=double definition.

Across
1 CUBIT – Cu + BIT.
4 ALDEBURGH – from Chris De Burgh.
9 MADELEINE – MADE + LE + I + N[ic]E.
10 REGAN – dd, I think, though the characters involved are unfamiliar.
11 OBTUSE – O + BT + USE
12 WAVERLEY – WAVE + (E[dinburgh] in RLY).
14 FREE-FOR-ALL – dd.
16 STOP – S + TOP.
19 TEAM – [dispara]TE AM[ateurs].
20 BY AND LARGE – (GARDEN ABLY)*.
22 WRITE OUT – hom. of “Right out!”
23 NIMBLE – MB in NILE.
26 OLIVE – (E[xtra] V[irgin] OIL)*.
27 LIKE A SHOT – dd.
28 PAGEANTRY – GEA[r] in PANTRY.
29 TRIAD – [supermarke]T + RAID*.
Down
1 COME OFF IT – COME OFF + IT.
2 BIDET – BI + D + ET, I think.
3 TELLS OFF – ELLS in TOFF.
4 AMIS – I in (A MS).
5 DREW A BLANK – dd.
6 BURIES – RUBIES*.
7 REGULATOR – (GOT A RULER)*.
8 HENRY – dd. Henry James, the author.
13 GREY MULLET – dd.
15 EXAMINING – MINI in (EX + ANG[ola]).
17 PRESENTED – RESENT in (P + ED).
18 CLAIMANT – (L + A1 MAN) in CT.
21 GENEVA – ([he]AVEN + EG)<.
22 WHOOP – WHO + OP.

10 comments on “Independent 7,300 by Dac”

  1. Hi Simon
    10ac is RE (on) NAG reversed (horseback)
    24dn BAHAI – 1 AHAB reversed
    25dn OKAY – O [Peter] KAY

  2. Thank you, Simon. Exactly the same experience – whizzed through all except 10ac and 8dn; the former I’m still unsure about.

    25dn is OKAY, referencing the comedian Peter Kay, who comes from oop north.

  3. Thanks for explaining 10ac, Gaufrid. Knowing five-eights of naff all about King Lear didn’t help me here, but it’s a clever clue.

  4. I’ve just about done enough crosswords now to be able to remember that Lear’s bad daughters were Regan and Gonorrhea … sorry Goneril, so I was OK with at one. I was also OK with Okay, although I did think for a second or two it might be something to do with the Scots “ay”. The ones I had most difficulty with were King James, which I thought was very clever, and Madeleine, which, not being much of a cake person, I’d never come across.

  5. Neal, with you on Shakespeare and me on Proust we would have cracked this one. A madeleine is most famously referred to in one of the key scences of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), where as an adult the distinctive smell of the cake takes him back to Sunday mornings in his childhood.

  8. Excellent stuff as usual from Dac. I loved 4ac, I’d not spotted that possibility before and do wonder if Chris has a brother called Alan.

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