Guardian 26,082 – Crucible

42 comments on “Guardian 26,082 – Crucible”

1. Thanks Andrew – I’m afraid we thought that the missionary position mentioned in 22A was something a bit naughtier that you thought. Very much a Paul clue!
   Excellent crossword for a Friday – we thought it could easily have been a prize puzzle with lots of classical and literary references Charon,Magenta, Clarissa etc.

2. Thanks Crucible and Andrew. Not sure if I’m on completely the wrong track, but I had 22A as a reference to the sexual position.

3. @Shirley – great minds etc.

4. Thanks S & Q, I’m sure you’re both right about the missionary position: don’t know how I missed that!

5. I’d have to go along with Shirley,as regards to 22a

6. Thanks Andrew and Crucible. I agree this was a challenge, and needed your explanations on a couple.

   The “missionary” I envisage in 22ac is the “chaste” position for sexual intercourse ?

   The Battle of Magenta in unfamiliar to me, but the colour could certainly be described as “bloody”

   One more point: you seem to have left yesterdays clue for 1d, instead of todays ?

   Other than that, an insightful blog to a tough puzzle. Well done.

7. I think the allusion in 22 is sexual. But perhaps you are affecting innocence. Nice joke if so.

8. Thanks Andrew and Crucible
   While I was doing this, I was irritated by a perceived looseness in some of the clues (RUNES, for example). It was only after much further reading that I realised how clever some of them were (though I’m still not entirely happy about “flipped” turning U into N, and I agree with Andrew about ALBUMS – should it have been “seats”?). I don’t think OENOPHILE quite works as an &lit either – surely he/she wouldn’t drink litres (in one sitting, at least)?
   CICERO taught me something I didn’t know about typefaces; STD CODE was another favourite.

9. Pretty much what one has come to expect.

10. Thanks, Andrew.

    What a great puzzle – Crucible on top form. Many lovely touches, [’21A’, 45=EP and Tours streets, etc.] I suppose the last must have been used before, as an alternative to ‘Nice’ but I don’t remember seeing it.

    I looked up to see if Magenta was a particularly bloody battle but could find no evidence, so concluded it was a reference to the colour [of the dye found in the same year and named after the battle: Wikipedia – Collins:a deep purplish red]. [I now see Stella has beaten me to it!]

    Huge thanks, as ever, Crucible – I loved it.

11. Thanks, Andrew. A great puzzle, as others have said, although a little too cerebral for my depth of knowledge (Google required, I’m afraid, for the EPISTOLARY bits.)

    The only clue I really didn’t take to was OPPO – even the 2 Rs meant n as “and” not “in” giving PPOO.

12. 13dn I immediately associated “45” with a record, but stalled for some time trying to start the word DISC…..!

13. Thanks, Andrew.

    Nice one from Crucible. I thought at first that all those linkages between clues would make this a very difficult puzzle, but it turned out not to be so (for me, at least). Fortunately, there was a scattering of fairly easy clues, and I got LIAISONS DANGEREUSES very early from the L_A crossers, which set me up.

    Lots of clever clues: I particularly liked ‘Tours streets’ and ‘Shabby person wearing trousers’. ’45 royalist’ seemed to refer to the Jacobite Rebellion – nice misdirection.

    I’m not entirely happy with GOTH as ‘German’. GermanIC, yes: the Goths were a Germanic people, but they spoke an East Germanic language, not a West Germanic one like modern German, Dutch and English. The Vikings’ languages were North Germanic, and we would never refer to Scandinavians as ‘German’.

14. Thanks, Andrew. I needed your explanations for quite a few of these. I found this fairly tough and was pleased to finish. Like you, I originally misspelled Nicotiana which held me up a bit.

    My favourite was 4dn for its neatness and clever misdirection.

    Thanks, Crucible!

15. Andrew

    Thanks for the blog(s). Like you, I found this a challenge from start (UNOPENED) to finish (EDITIONS), with many well-constructed and clever clues (21A, 5D, 8D etc.). I think there is yet another layer to 5D: an ASCENDER is a piece of equipment used by climbers and mountaineers, which is designed to slide easily along a rope in one direction, but grip it firmly in the other. A person climbing a free-hanging rope will use two of them, a mountaineer using a fixed rope as safety on a steep slope will use one.

16. The Battle of Magenta was horrific and Bloody and gave rise to the deep blood red “Magenta”

17. The sex clue made me chortle. I am currently reading Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, which makes Paul look like a prude…Nice stuff. Since a) the literal ‘collector books’ is so neat and b) I’m so thoroughly up mathematical, I thought ALBUMS was fine.

18. Oops – blooming iPad; ‘unmathematical’.

19. There were apparently quite a lot of casualties in the Battle of Magenta, between the forces of France and Piedmont-Sardinia on one side and the Austrians on the other. But far more bloody was the decisive Battle of Solferino, a few weeks later in the same campaign. Defeat of the Austrians led to the annexation of Lombardy by Piedmont-Sardinia and the start of the rapid reunification of Italy. And witnessing the carnage at Solferino prompted the Swiss Jean-Henri Dunant to found the Red Cross.

    So I don’t think that blood had anything to do with the naming of the dye developed by the British chemists Maule and Nicholson. After all, magenta is purplish and not blood red. I think the name reflects the widespread interest and sympathy of the British for the cause of the Risorgimento and Magenta was a suitably exotic name that just sounded better than Solferino,

20. Thanks for the blog, Andrew.

    I missed the parsing of 25A. Educated as an anagrind? That’s new to me.

    I think 2D is fine. The nearly applies to the whole phrase. i.e. Every seat would be “all bums”, so nearly every seat gives (or at least could give) albums.

21. Interesting, Gervase. My school was founded in 1862 – three years after the Battle of Magenta – and, at some point, adopted magenta as the school colour. I will now endeavour to find out when exactly.

22. Didn’t finish, which is more of a rarity than it used to be. Still at least I got the amusing bits!

23. The variety of devices in this puzzle disguises somewhat the preponderance of anagrams. There are twelve.

    As observed by phitonelly @20 ‘educated’ in 25ac is an unusual indicator. I think it works in the sense of refined.

    I don’t understand ‘rowing’ in 3dn. Perhaps ‘roving’ was intended.

24. Thanks all
    A superior Crucible.

25. rhotician@23
    I may be well off track, but I took ‘rowing’ as the anagram indicator for ‘relic’, ‘rowing’ connoting ‘falling out’.
    George Clements

26. I took ‘rowing’ in the same way as George Clements.

    As for ‘educated’, we’re well used to ‘trained’ as an indicator and Chambers gives it as a synonym [but I would not!]

    i agree with phitonelly re 2dn.

27. Brilliant puzzle, though it took a lot of head scratching. The only disappointment was 27 across STD CODE. It seemed to me that Crucible had painted himself (herself? – can’t remember)into a corner with that one, though I can’t see what other way it could have worked without resetting the whole SW corner.

28. Claire @ #27 – pretty sure it’s a him. STD CODE is OK, I think – it’s in Collins dict for example.

29. Not the easiest of puzzles but I got there in the end, with EMEND my LOI.

    At 3dn a ferryman would row his passenger(s), and while “roving” could be attached to a journalist (roving reporter) I think “rowing” works as an anagrind and fits the surface reading better. I’ve come across the device used in the CHAUCER clue before and saw it immediately. I thought the clues for ALBUMS and OPPO weren’t that good, and there were too many cross-referenced clues for my taste, but it was mostly a technically excellent puzzle.

30. I had a brief look at this late morning, got almost nowhere, then picked it up again after dinner. Perhaps my brain was rested because I did manage to wheedle it out. The hardest Crucible ever? But well, well worth the struggle.

31. Excellent puzzle I particularly liked that Crucible correctly identified NI as “province” rather than the usual offensive “Ulster” . Hopefully this is an editorial decision and the previous practice has been consigned to the dustbin along with other offensive terms that were previously considered OK.

32. Now I need further parsing for 22. Strikes me as unlikely that a couple of missionaries would be ftf; you normally need a lay person to assume the position.

33. Thanks, Andrew.

    I enjoyed most of this until I got stuck on TL corner. I had thought of CHANCER for 1a but didn’t count CHCNAER as a likely answer! I consider the “heart flipped” bit to be a little unfair: I always use caps in my entries, and the official solution (and yours) are always caps, too.

    Am I the only one not to understand OPPO = MATE? Is it short for OPPOSITE ONE = WIFE/HUSBAND?

34. George and Eileen: I’ll buy falling out for rowing. Thanks.

    What I quite like about 25 is that an oenophile might well be said to have an educated palate. Collins also gives refined as a synonym.

35. Stiofain @31
    But Northern Ireland is not a province. Ulster’s the province. So I don’t see how your displeasure is less. But, whatever.

36. Good point Dave E. I always thought that it was Opposite Number, which isn’t quite mate is it?

37. Excellent all round. I’m with Phitonelly et al about 2d’s being fine.
    1d, 4d are clever.
    Failed on 22.
    ‘Labour Leader’ is fast overtaking ‘journalist’ or similar for ED
    Thanks again Andrew

38. By the way, are you still around Michelle?

39. Dave Ellison @33

    I filled in CHAUCER at 1ac without a qualm, taking ‘flipped’ as simply ‘changed’. I was totally charmed by Andrew’s explanation, which hadn’t occurred to me and makes it an even better clue.

    rhotician @34

    Yes, of course: that’s why ‘trained’ would not do here!

40. Gervase@19 – that reminded me of when I was trying to identify whether a stamp in my schoolboy collection was a rare variety a couple of the shades were catalogued as ‘magenta’ and ‘solferino’ – I don’t think I ever discovered just what the latter was, as I had the common (‘purple-red’)one. (That must have been 75 years ago, and now is probably the only time I’ve heard of the colour since.)

41. Andrew re 7,18. French almost always uses the definite article (in this case “Les”) while we don’t in English, so the translation to English is simply “Dangerous Liaisons” without the article. So by a sort of reverse argument I don’t think there is anything wrong with dropping the redundant “Les” from the answer.

42. No one will ever see this, given that I’m writing three years after the puzzle appeared, but I can’t resist pointing out that all the commentators missed the construction of 22 across (the missionary one): it’s “facet of a CE”= “view of a church “.

Comments are closed.