Financial Times 15,456 by GOZO

16 comments on “Financial Times 15,456 by GOZO”

1. For LYALL as well as the homophone, “among political friends” = “alLY ALLy” ? Pretty obscure!

   Great fun though I needed a bit of help to confirm and hunt for a couple.

   Thanks Goxo and PeeDee for more clarity

2. Update: could 7 down be Alfred Lyall, perhaps know to his friends as “Alf” and found in politicAL Friends? I’m clutching at straws here…

3. Oh and I thought it might be Alfred Comyn Lyall, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Comyn_Lyall, who I thought perhaps fitted better than a thriller writer. (I knew neither!)

   Thanks for the pictures!

4. peterj – we crossed there. I think you are probably right.

5. Fine puzzle and fine blog, PeeDee. You went the extra mile with all the visuals. My problems with 7d were compounded by reading the parenthetical “l’s” as Liberal (as in Party.)

6. I enjoyed this, and got all the writers without help, though I hadn’t heard of MUSSET (for a while I wondered if there was a writer called OBSTER…).

   I see there’s plenty of choice for LYALL, but I assumed it was Gavin. (He was married to Katherine Whitehorn, of Observer fame.)

7. Nice to see a single grid Gozo- I liked Mallarme. Thanks all.

8. And thanks for visuals

9. Good fun. Pretty easy to get the theme but I hadn’t heard of a few of the writers, including the starters at 1a and 1d. LYALL was unparsed (I thought it was the thriller writer) and was v. clever.

   Thanks to PeeDee for taking the trouble to find all the pics (that Alfred, Lord Tennyson looks like a bit of a wild man – maybe too much striving, seeking, finding and not yielding) and to Gozo.

10. I found a picture of Gavin Lyall too so one can compare and contrast.

11. Really excellent Gozo crossword.

    LYALL (7d) was my last one in, thanks to peterj for explaining the ‘friends’ bit.
    I liked the – what I call – Guardianism in 20d (CLOSE TO).
    Only thing I didn’t like was ‘rewrote’ as anagram indicator in 29ac, should have been ‘rewritten’ in my opinion.
    But hey, there’s always something.

    Thanks to PeeDee and Gozo.

12. Thanks Gozo and PeeDee

    I think that 9D is A + TRIUMphant as (a) TRIUM is more thah half of TRIUMPH and (b) a triumph is ‘a’ success, whereas TRIUMPHANT fits the clue’s SUCCESSFUL to a T.

13. Thankyou PeeDee for the blog and going to the extra trouble with the illustrations. Edifying. I was thrown off in the NW with a wrong entry for 3D, thinking that painful was an anagrind and the god was erra. Liked the ‘rear’ reversal indicator for down clue. My first ins were Amis, Schiller, Emile Zola which helped a lot, as did the grid. Some of the others were unknown to me. Strangely, despite googling lists of philosophers, I didn’t get 14D until later. Great clue.

    Agree with Simon S @12 re 9D.

14. Simon @12 – quite so, fixed now.

15. Thanks Gozo and PeeDee

    Most enjoyably themed crossword which, with the help from references for at least five of the writers, went without too many problems early until I hit the NE corner.

    Had entered IMPEDANCES initially at 6d which I never went back to fix and ended up entering PEAKE ( a thriller author, which was totally against the type of writer used in the rest of the puzzle) – was even able to justify it (PEAK as in widow’s peak – which one wouldn’t have if ‘balding’ and E ‘finish the wine’).

    Didn’t see the ‘alLY ALLY’ trick with 7d so didn’t understand what was happening with the second half of the clue.

    Lots of interesting variety in the devices used throughout the crossword with my favourite being CLOSE TO,

16. ruce – there was also Mervyn Peake writer, painter and poet who would fit into the writers here quite well. I remember enjoying the Gormenghast books very much when I was younger.

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