Financial Times 15,302 by HAMILTON

by

Rather harder than the normal Tuesday offering, I thought, and including a quite brilliant long anagram. 

Hard but fair from Hamilton, on the whole. A couple of minor quibbles, but all forgiven for that 26-letter anagram. Crikey.

completed grid

  

Across
1, 8 ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Trumpeter that no-one talks about (8,2,3,4)
  Whole clue charade.
‘The elephant in the room’ is a phrase which – like ‘between a rock and a hard place’, ‘no-brainer’, ‘heads-up’ and ‘bottom line’ – has somehow travelled from non-existent through faintly amusing to tiresome cliche in, what, about twenty years…? Other examples welcome.
7 HATE Not the devoted half of an extreme relationship (4)
  Whole-clue again, as in a ‘love-hate’ situation without the love, I take it, although I’m not entirely convinced.
9 ORAL Said it returns in an irregular orbit (4)
  Reversal in irreguLAR Orbit. Just to be picky, the ‘an’ in the clue seems redundant here.
10 FLUCTUATED Was up and down, but destined to receive mostly success on Tuesday (10)
 

‘Destined’ is FATED, into which (‘receive’) we place LUC (most of ‘luck’, for ‘success’) and TU, short for Tuesday.
(Abbreviations are odd, aren’t they? You’d have to be pretty short of time to write, say, JUL for JULY yet one sees it daily.)
11 LEADEN Heavy metal measurement (6)
  LEAD (metal) + EN for the printer’s measure of space. (Surely some rather leaden duplication here, or is it only me?)
12 HALATION Foggy effect made by breathing out when former partner’s gone (8)
  (EX)HALATION without your EX.
13 HYDRATES Adds water to allegedly suppress grades (8)
 

‘Allegedly’ is a (rather iffy, IMHO) pointer to HYD as a homophone of ‘hide’ (‘suppress’), followed by ‘RATES for ‘grades’. 
15, 27 COME DOWN The disappointment cowmen do suffer (8)
  Anagram (‘do suffer’) of COWMEN.
17   See 5
 
19 TRADE OFF Compromise when business is bad (5-3)
  Double definition.
22 HACIENDA French company gets assistance around a farmstead (8)
  HAND (‘assistance’) surrounds CIE, for ‘French company’ (as in, say, ‘Dupont et cie’) followed by ‘A’.
23 OBJECT Take exception to article (6)
  Double definition.
25 PERIWIGGED Exercise fixed to include one woman initially wearing a hairpiece (10)
  PE (‘excercise’) then 1 W(oman) in (‘to include’) RIGGED, for ‘fixed’.
26 WHIM Fancy a week with that guy? (4)
  W (‘week’)  + HIM.
27   See 15
 
28 DARJEELING Move faster to get sweetheart round for tea (10)
  JEE is an alternative to GEE as a command to  ‘move faster’, Chambers assures us. DARLING (‘sweetheart’) surrounds that.
Down
2 LARCENY Distracted, nearly caught thieving (7)
  Anagram (‘distracted’) of NEARLY and C (for ‘caught’ in cricket. Well done to the lads v. Pakistan, btw.)
3 PALED Secretary was in charge but faded (5)
  PA (Personal Assistant, ‘secretary’) then LED for ‘was in charge’.
4 AFFINITY Tiffany and I have amazing chemistry (8)
  Anagram (‘have amazing’, I suppose) of TIFFANY + I.
5, 17, 20 TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION French historian in Stuttgart discovering real life beyond his imagination (5,2,8,4,7)
  Astonishing anagram (‘discovering’) of those first four words. Easily clue of the day.
6 NETTLE The bottom line – settle 50%, that’ll annoy (6)
  NET (for ‘the bottom line’, here used correctly despite comments in 1,8) + back half (50%) of setTLE.
7 HEARTACHE Character touched by pain and sorrow (9)
  Had to be an anagram of ‘character’, didn’t it? Nope. It’s HEART (‘character’) next to (‘touched by’) ‘pain’ (ACHE). Cleverly irritating misdirection.
8   See 1
 
14 RENDITION Performance number has its opening covered by the navy (9)
  Tricksy one, this, and my last solved. A ‘number’ is an EDTION (of, say, a magazine). Its opening, ‘E’, is ‘covered’ by RN, for our boys in blue. Nice.
16 CANOODLE One with a cold is no good for a smooch (8)
  Anagram (‘is no good’) of ONE with A COLD. Good word, smooch.
18 HEAVE HO Rejection makes sailors cry (5- 2)
 

Double definition. ‘Heave-ho!’ is a sailor’s call for effort, and, somewhat paradoxically, to give an unwanted lover or employee ‘the old heave-ho’ is forcibly to part company with them. Odd pairing.
20   See 5
 
21 UNKIND Somewhat drunk in defeat and thus unfeeling (6)
  Inclusion (‘somewhat’) in drUNK IN Defeat.
24 JEWEL Prize baguette? (5)
  Double definition, ‘baguette’ being an elongated rectangular cut of, e.g., a diamond.

*anagram

9 comments on “Financial Times 15,302 by HAMILTON”

  1. Quite an effort this morning, but worth it for the very clever long anagram. Also liked 1, 8ac very much. Thank you Hamilton.

    Thank you for the early blog, Grant. I agree with your minor quibbles.

  2. Great effort to come up with that 26 letter anagram, the longest I can remember. Had a blank with HACIENDA, but otherwise went in OK, even though some were bunged in first and parsed later. Favourite was CANOODLE – thank goodness ‘smooch’ was used rather than that horrible word ‘snog’.

    Un-favourite tiresome clichés – ‘ticks all the boxes’ closely followed by ‘going forward’.

    Thanks to setter and blogger.

  3. True, the answers at 15, 27 go in two different slots. However, the clue is one and the def is “the disappointment”, n. So, can we expect the solution in the blog above to be typed as one word?

  4. Grant
    Many thanks for the blog. I must confess that the clue for “elephant” was not the one originally submitted; I woke in the middle of the night 2-3 days afterwards with this one buzzing in my head and had to scribble the revised wording down so I didn’t forget it the next morning!
    As to the cliche collection, what about our having to think outside those boxes/envelopes?

  5. Posting seems to have finished so I’ll just say this by way of sign-off…

    If I’d come up with as beautiful an anagram as Hamilton did for 5d et al, I’d have kept my powder dry for a better surface. How about this…

    “French historian in Stuttgart? You couldn’t make it up!”

    Other tries?

  6. Sorry, Hamilton, I jumped past yr post because that fabulous anagram has been rolling around my head all day.

    Presumptuous of me, of course, but huge respect, my master. How on earth do you do that stuff?

    In frank admiration,
    Grant.

  8. Thanks Grant and Hamilton.

    A nicely constructed puzzle with some nice misdirection (as in 7dn) and of course the brilliant anagram at 5dn.

    I’m not normally a fan of cryptic definitions but 7ac was a corker.

    A good fun challenge.

  9. Thanks Hamilton and Grant

    Did this one a couple of Sundays ago over a cup of coffee somewhere … and remember enjoying it a lot !!! That anagram at 5,17,20 was sublime.

    No real problems with filling in the grid but there were a few that I hadn’t parsed properly or at all – missed the LOVE-HATE thingy at 7, didn’t see the word play at 11 and just must have bunged it in and 14d was way too tricky for me to fully see though I reckon that I saw all of the composite parts of the wordplay but didn’t fit it altogether in the end.

    CANOODLE (cleverly disguised anagram) and TRADE-OFF were my last two in.

    For what its worth this far after, agree with Rishi about it being one word at 15,27 and the ‘do’ is a part of the fodder rather than a part of the anagrind.

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