Other than a numbering malfunction in the online edition once it had finally become available after a couple of days (across clue numbers from 29 needed to be incremented which I spent far too long on unraveling), fairly standard Azed fare — I couldn’t find 9D in Chambers but perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently thorough.
Across
2 CACKLE – K in c[or]acle
8 K(HAY)A – African tree.
13 SIROC – “wind becoming moister” (is that really a word?) – rev(cor,is) – cor = 10 baths (bushels).
14 HAYMOW* – rick of hay
15 T-(C)ARTS – T shaped carriage.
16 PREP[one] – schoolboy homework and prepone is “bring forward.
17 A,THETOSIS – (this toes)* – slow movement of extremities due to brain damage.
21 KOB,AN – obsolete Japanese coin and kob is a waterbuck.
23 SIDHA*- the power of nirvana!
25 ITALICISATION* – (it is Catilina, o)* – ref. the typeface (not Romanisation).
26 VEDUTISTA* – painter of panoramas (vedute)
30 CAST – 3 meanings: to seek, rejects
31 ER(‘OT)IC* – something ‘eated is ‘ot (in the proverbial East End)
32 BESIDE – De[l]ibes* – at rest.
33 QUE,LL – Shak. slaying.
34 S,ASSE* – obs. lock (sluice)
35 CHESTY – hidden (though literally prominent).
Down
1 A,S(TAT)KI – petroleum residue.
2 CICERO – (e, croci)* – a kind of typeface, so might be sized at 13 points.
3 ARAB – hidden (took me a long time to find this in: “Good-looking mount — what’s unclear about framing?”
4 CORONA LUCIS – (colours i can)*. A round chandelier hung in church.
5 LIST – 3 meanings (including the architectural type of fillet)
6 EUPHEMISTIC*
7 T(HR,EN)OS – Shak. lamentation. hr,en in rev(sot)
9 HYPONI(T)ROUS* – T in (your siphon)* in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponitrous_acid
10 A,M(USE)D – MD=managing director and not doctor this time.
11 YO[n],GI[n]
12 AWLS – first letters
19 I(N)CISED* – N in (disc, i.e.)*
20 SA(NIC[k])LE – A woodland plant and SALE=demand (of selling)
22 BA(DA)SS – da=Burmese knife.
24 HO(MI)LY – also means prone. The first year of the millennium starting in 1001=MI.
26 VI(B)S – vis=force and VIBS are Vibram shoes.
27 E,LEA – refhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleatics, Greek philosophers who met in ELEA
28 TECH – hidden
29 STET[son] – editing language to leave something as is.
I think 9D is in Chambers all right as an acid in p 750 of my 12th edition.
Thanks for the blog.
One of the clues I couldn’t fully parse was 18a but you’ve overlooked it. I have TRANSIENTNESS which I assume is T+RAN + a word for copper reversed in a word for imps but that’s as far as I can get. Perhaps someone could enlighten me?
T,RAN,SIENT(NES)S where NES=rev(sen=Japanese coin=copper) and SIENTS=scions=imps (archaic).
I agree (implicitly) that the wordplay was pretty hard — both copper=sen and the impish term.
I was struggling with 18a as well, and came up with T,RAN,SIEN(TNES)S with TNES as reverse of sent (Estonian monetary unit) in SIENS=scions=imps.
However, Chambers doesn’t specifically give SENT as “a coin of this value”, while it does with SEN, so I’d guess that the version @3 is probably the right one.