Simplicity with some elegance from Gurney today.
Nothing too taxing but 1 Down goes straight into my Little Book of Favourite Clues.
| Across | ||
| 9 | HUNDRED YEARS WAR | Long struggle of batter: day runs were hard (7,5,3) |
| Anagram (‘batter’) of DAYS RUN WERE HARD, to give the mostly Anglo-French conflict from 1337 to 1453 which, to save you the sums, is 116 years. | ||
| 10 | ROSIE | Girl got up about one (5) |
| ROSE (‘got up’) around 1. | ||
| 11 | NILE GREEN | Colour of love, say? Certainly not poetic in retrospect (4,5) |
| NIL (‘love’, as in tennis, well done Andy) then EG (‘say’), then a reversal of NE’ER, poetic – or indeed Scots – for ‘certainly not.’ Are ‘nile green’ and ‘nile blue’ in fact different clours? Who decides these things? | ||
| 12 | IGNORANCE | One racing off showing lack of knowledge (9) |
| Anagram (‘off’) of ONE RACING. | ||
| 14 | SCALE | Such a clue oddly established standard (5) |
| Odd (as in not even) letters of SuCh A cLuE. I’m not sure whether ‘established’ belongs with the wordplay or the definition. It works either way, I think. | ||
| 16 | TIGHTEN ONES BELT | Seeing nth bottle being ordered, economise? (7,4,4) |
| Anagram (‘ordered’) of SEEING NTH BOTTLE. | ||
| 19 | STAYS | Wanders off? Not right – remains (5) |
| STRAYS (‘wanders off’) without its ‘R’ for ‘right’. Neat surface. | ||
| 21 | INSTANTER | Entrant is processed immediately (9) |
| A sure fit of anagrams today. This one is ‘processed’ out of ENTRANT IS. | ||
| 23 | RESPECTED | Looked up to revolutionary having absorbed short description (note) (9) |
| RED (‘revolutionary’) includes ASPECT (‘description’) which is shortened – from the front, unusually – and followed by the note of ‘E’. Tricky little parse, this one. | ||
| 25 | TONER | Cosmetic from past one remembers (5) |
| Inclusion in pasT ONE Remembers. | ||
| 26 | A MONTH OF SUNDAYS | When best wear is continually needed? (1,5,2,7) |
| Whole-clue cryptic definition, a charade on ‘Sunday best’ clothes. | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | THIRTIETHS | Small parts in last days – four times out of twelve (10) |
| Deightfully deceitful double definition. The 30th is the last day of four of the months of the year. My last in. Duh. | ||
| 2 | UNISON | College boy in complete agreement (6) |
| UNI + SON. | ||
| 3 | TRUE GRIT | Film – dry, about French street, not entirely grim (4,4) |
| TT (teetotal or ‘dry’) + GRIm, all surrounding RUE (‘French street’) to give us John Wayne’s one-eyed sheriff. | ||
| 4 | EDEN | PM in garden (4) |
| Double definition. Anthony EDEN was prime minister from 1955 to 1957, resigning after the Suez crisis. | ||
| 5 | REAL TENNIS | Tears linen, playing old game (4,6) |
| Anagram (‘playing’) of TEARS LINEN. There’s some dispute about whether ‘real’ in fact means ‘royal’. Either way, it’s certainly an old (and very strange) game. | ||
| 6 | BRUGES | Cruel people using guns at first for time in European city (6) |
| BRUTES with its T (for ‘time’) replaced by ‘G’ (Guns “at first”). | ||
| 7 | TWEENAGE | Referring to children as over- sentimental, keep complaining, ultimately horrible (8) |
| TWEE (‘over-sentimental’), then NAG (‘keep complaining’) then ‘E’ (‘horriblE’, ultimately). | ||
| 8 | WREN | Architect’s songbird (4) |
| Double definition. Christopher Wren died in 1723. If you you’d like to see his monument, go to St. Paul’s and have a look round. | ||
| 13 | NON-FICTION | Idea about new female in charge that’s not fanciful? (3-7) |
| NOTION around N,F + I.C. as standard abbreviations. | ||
| 15 | ENTERPRISE | Travelling around, I represent business (10) |
| Anagram (‘travelling around’) of I REPRESENT. | ||
| 17 | GRASS BOX | Give information about fight for outdoor container (5,3) |
| GRASS (informally, to inform on someone) + BOX (‘fight’). | ||
| 18 | SHANTUNG | Quiet worker in East End suspended silk fabric (8) |
| SH (‘quiet’), ANT (‘worker’) + ‘UNG, which is yer Cockney for ‘hung’ (suspended). Shantung, Chambers tells us, is wild silk woven into plain, rough cloth which seems an effortful waste of wormly resources. | ||
| 20 | SHEATH | Protective cover reduces heat haze to some extent . . . . (6) |
| Inclusion (‘to some extent’) in reduceS HEAT Haze. | ||
| 22 | TIN HAT | . . . . and another one that’s securing home? (3,3) |
| i.e., another ‘protective cover’, borrowed from the last clue. I’m never quite sure whether that’s legitimate although it’s straightforward enough here. Anyway, the construction is THAT which surrounds (‘secures’) IN for ‘home’. | ||
| 23 | READ | Study about Christian era (4) |
| RE (‘about’) + AD (anno domini). ‘Read’ as in ‘study as a college subject’, of course. | ||
| 24 | DUSK | Twilight of the French Sun King (4) |
| DU (masculine ‘of the’ in Fr.), ‘S’ and ‘K’ as standard abbrevs. | ||
*anagram
Thank you, Grant – your opening remarks are just what I would have said! 1d is my favourite clue, too.
Many thanks to Gurney for such a pleasant start to the day.
A bit easier than the usual FT for me today. Didn’t know INSTANTER or SHANTUNG and I found the parsing of a few others a bit tricky eg RESPECTED, maybe because ‘revolutionary’ wasn’t the usual ‘Che’ and I was initially trying to fit in ‘Reed’ instead. I eventually parsed it as RED (‘revolutionary’) includes SPEC (‘description’) as shortened form of ‘specification’ followed by the ‘note’ TE. I think your parsing is better though as the note is really ‘ti’ rather than ‘te’.
I liked THIRTIETHS as well but my favourite was NILE GREEN, with the nice misdirection as the ‘colour of love’. This is the first quotation in the etymology section of the OED entry for ‘Nile-green’: “1871 Scribner’s Monthly June 209/1 ‘Nile green’ will turn some people into oranges, though twenty empresses ordain its adoption.” What on earth does that mean? By the way, as you’ve mentioned it, according to Wikipedia if you boil sulphuric acid with Nile blue (dye), you get Nile red. Not many people know that.
Thanks to Gurney and Grant.
Thanks Gurney and Grant.
I parsed 23 as WordPlodder @ 2: Chambers gives TE as a valid alternate for TI, and I think SPEC is far closer to DESCRIPTION than ASPECT: Chambers doesn’t support the latter.
1d is delightful.. thanks for parsing this for us :)very enjoyable piece from Gurney..
Now it’s gone quiet, I have to say that I agree with Simon and Wordplodder about the parsing of RESPECTED, although not by much.
I was quite proud of my ‘shortened’ version of (A)SPECT & although I’ve never come across it before I think it’s legitimate: why shouldn’t a word be shortened from the front?
Many thanks for the excellent blog, GB, and to all for their comments. I confirm that what was intended in RESPECTED was RED around SPEC and TE, SPEC being ‘short description’ as an abbreviation of specification. Also in SCALE “established” was part of the definition: this would refer, for example, to the Celsius scale of temperature.
A good crossword apart from 7 & 11 which were dreadful.
Thanks Grant and Gurney.
Nice puzzle.glad to see I parsed 23 as intended.
SHANTUNG was new to me too but elegantly clued.
Welcome New.
Any reason for classifying 7 and 11 as dreadful?
Thanks Gurney and Grant
A nice and easy puzzle from this setter with only two minor holdups – SHANTUNG (which needed to be checked after the word play was assembled) and the excellent, but not so obvious, reference to the four months that had the 30 days – in fact I didn’t end up seeing that at all until coming here!! INSTANTER I had seen in another puzzle that I had recently done, from whichever crossword period I was in at the time.
Finished in the SE corner with that INSTANTER and TIN HAT as the last couple in.