Guardian 27,366 / Pasquale

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A fairly typical puzzle from Pasquale, with the customary unfamiliar or half-forgotten word or two thrown in to challenge us – but all, as ever, meticulously clued and therefore ultimately solvable.

Thank you, Pasquale.

Definitions are underlined in the clues.

Across

1 A mineral – the thing put in a dish (7)
APATITE
IT [the thing] in A PÂTÉ [a dish]

5 Sink as container for domestic fuel (7)
SCUTTLE
Double definition

10 Ill-mannered type with short hair (4)
BEAR
BEAR[d] [short hair]

11 Heartless chum, too young for stealing (10)
PLUNDERAGE
P[a]L [heartless chum] + UNDER AGE [too young] – a new word for me: it’s specifically ‘stealing of goods on board ship’

12 Prestige of store by road junction (6)
CACHET
CACHE [store] + T [road junction]

13 No gentleman, guy retreating in fortified place (8)
GARRISON
A reversal [retreating] of NO SIR [no gentleman] + RAG [guy – in the sense of  to tease or ridicule]

14 New gate leading to forest that offers outdoor refreshments (3,6)
TEA GARDEN
Anagram [new] of GATE + ARDEN [Warwickshire forest, setting of ‘As you like it’]

16, 17 A false statement about dwarf Tom’s digital protection (10)
THUMB STALL
THUMB’S TALL would be a false statement about the story-book character or this person

19 Male’s attempt to get behind partner’s specious reasoning (9)
SOPHISTRY
HIS TRY [male’s attempt] after SOP [Significant Other Person – partner]

23 No one needing meat around before one gets rice dish (8)
BIRIYANI
A reversal [around] of NAY I [no one]  + RIB [meat] before I [one]

24 Sounds like cushion will get a bit wet (6)
PADDLE
Sounds like [pad’ll – cushion will]

26 It has cabins; it’s possibly nicer alone (5.5)
OCEAN LINER
Anagram [possibly] of NICER ALONE

27 One of four involved in a game offering security (4)
BAIL
Double definition, the first referring to cricket

28 Loveless person giving away nothing in this writer’s thriller (7)
MYSTERY
[o]YSTER [person giving nothing away, minus o – loveless] in MY [this writer’s]

29 Most virtuous dealer, maybe, embracing success (7)
WHITEST
WEST [maybe the dealer in a game of bridge] round HIT [success]

Down

2 Official gets to stride around making introduction (7)
PREFACE
PACE [stride] round REF[eree] [official]

3 Law of Moses coming from a rocky height – gosh! (5)
TORAH
TOR [rocky height] + AH [gosh]

4 Provider of booze creating spill around street (7)
TAPSTER
TAPER [spill] round ST[reet]

6 Programmers scored after rescheduling (6)
CODERS
Anagram [after rescheduling] of SCORED

7 Sailor the woman caught in wickedness upsettingly taints (9)
TARNISHES
TAR [sailor] + SHE [the woman] in a reversal [upsettingly] of SIN [wickedness]

8 The French fellow at match gets space to manoeuvre (7)
LEGROOM
LE [the French] + GROOM [fellow at match]

9 Mates lounging around as members of an old sect (13)
MUGGLETONIANS
Anagram [around] of MATES LOUNGING – for this unlikely-sounding old sect [made even more unlikely by J.K.Rowling: I remember blogging Puck’s puzzle where they were clued as ‘Person who can’t spell anoints new members of old sect’ – I did vaguely remember them from A Level History

15 Seek pleasure, having good time ensnaring completely terrible ruler (9)
GALLIVANT
G [good] T [time] round ALL [totally] IVAN [terrible ruler]

18 Nervous model losing heart to enchantress (7)
TWITCHY
T[o]Y [model] with WITCH [enchantress] replacing o

20 Not much of a drink, doubly hard to swallow it (7)
HA’PORTH
HH [doubly hard] round A PORT [a drink] – short for halfpennyworth, best known in the expression ‘Don’t spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar’ – it looks very odd  in the grid

21 Gatherings of king and supporters (7)
RALLIES
R [king] + ALLIES [supporters]

22 Hadrian type, wanting length set up in state of conflict? (6)
WALLER
A reversal [set up] of ELL [length, of cloth] in WAR [state of conflict]  – my least favourite clue

25 Beginning university beset by unfortunate financial situation (5)
DÉBUT
U [University] in DEBT [unfortunate financial situation] – I liked the surface of this one

53 comments on “Guardian 27,366 / Pasquale”

  2. Thanks Pasquale and Eileen

    Apart from the SE, I found this much easier than a typical Pasquale, though I had a lucky guess with 9d, thinking, from the crossers, “It couldn’t possibly start “muggle”, could it?”

    The SE took much longer, not helped by a perfectly valid LOCK (as in Rugby Union) for 27a; this was eventually proved wrong by DEBUT.

    I didn’t see where the SOP in SOPHISTRY came from. Are GARRISONs necessarily fortified?

  3. Thanks for the blog. I had T(wigg)y as the model. Didn’t like 3 much, but no complaints, all fairly clued.

  4. Hi Andy Smith @3
    I think you’re probably right – and I prefer it. 😉

    muffin @2 Collins – not necessarily, I think, but Chambers has ‘a fortified place’ as one definition.

  5. Having seen where the SOP in SOPHISTRY and the YSTER in MYSTERY came from, I’m not surprised I didn’t see either of them. I liked the French fellow.

  6. I enjoyed this as far as it went but I failed on BEAR and still do not really understand the second definition. Finally put in 9 down, but had never heard of them and needed your help, Eileen for SOP of SOPHISTRY and to fully parse THUMB. Many thanks to the Don and Eileen.

  7. In one way, it doesn’t matter what the middle of the model is, as it’s not there anyway (like the old waiter joke: we’ve got no cream – would you like it without custard instead?). But I also prefer Twiggy.

  8. Ths may risk provoking a ‘political correctness gone mad’ response, but I am uneasy with 29a, WHITEST for ‘most virtuous’, for obvious reasons…

  11. Eileen @9 – but is BEAR really an ill-mannered type? Hmm.
    Oh, and quenbarrow – I’m afraid that’s political correctness gone mad.

  12. Ed @11 – well, I didn’t think I’d met it – my first thought was BOOR – but Collins has ‘a clumsy, churlish or ill-mannered person’ and Chambers ‘any rude, rough or ill-mannered fellow’.

  14. Thanks Pasquale and Eileen.

    Are the 9downs Muggeridge’s leftie schoolmates? I’m not sure why Fats wasn’t used in the clue for WALLER; perhaps the Don thought that had been done too much before. I hadn’t heard of the other meaning of oyster.

    Thumb’s tall, eh, ha ha. I liked the nervous model, whether it was Twiggy or not (I also assumed ‘toy.’)

  15. Undone by the don for the first time in ages. Couldn’t even get bail!
    Not keen on obscure clues solved by anagram rather than wordplay. 9d could just as well have been gumglenotians for me!
    Thanks to p for the working over and to Eileen for the elegant as ever blog.

  16. Serves me right for complaining about Rufus being too quick a solve yesterday! This was altogether much more tricky. It’s discouraging when 1ac is the last one in, and an uneducated guess at that, but APATITE is a new one to me.

    A few parsings defeated me: SOP in SOPHISTRY, oYSTER, THUMB’S TALL and the cricket BAIL (then again, after England’s latest drubbing I’m not thinking about cricket just now).

    I loved ‘dealer’ for WEST, though like quenbarrow @8 above, I was a little uneasy to see WHITEST defined as ‘most virtuous’. I am not keen on the whole “political correctness gone mad” argument as a lot of intolerance and insensitivity hides behind it in my view (should I have said “mad”?).

    Thanks as always Eileen for clear and insightful explanations. I’ve been puzzling since the 1970s and sometimes I still feel like a novice compared to some of the bloggers on here!

    Thanks Pasquale, and come back Rufus, all is forgiven!

  17. I was held up by 10a, having the R at the end and BOOR fitting the def but not parsing.. Bear parsed but I wouldnt apply that word to an ill-mannered person-(I rather like bears.)
    Again, WALLER was clued well enough but it wasnt in Chambers, which is my crossword bible.

    Otherwise I really liked this.

    Thanks Eileen and Pasquale.

  18. Fun puzzle. FOI was APATITE, which seems to beg for a homophonic clue, but I guess its been done before. I almost put CANOE LINER into 26 before having second thoughts. I needed help with the parsing of BEAR, obvious now that Eileen’s explained it, and with the SOP part of SOPHISTRY.
    There seems to be a minitheme with (Jimmy) GARRISON, (Jack) TEAGARDEN and (Fats) WALLER. Any others?

    Thanks, Eileen and Pasquale.

  21. Thank you Pasquale and Eileen.

    The SW corner was last for me to fill in, but WALLER was no problem for me since I often use the term “dry-stone waller”.

  22. Managed to finish this, which is not always the case with the Don. SE corner was last in (HAPORTH and PADDLE). I’d heard of MUGGLETONIANS, which helped; I’m another who didn’t know the meaning of SOP (thanks, Eileen); and the ‘one of four’ in BAIL eluded me. Favourites were MYSTERY, GALLIVANT and TWITCHY. Many thanks to Pasquale and Eileen.

  23. Re BEAR – there is a Chekhov one act play called “The Bear”, where the title character is a grumpy misogynist. Walton made an opera from it. Bear seems equivalent to Boor in this context

  24. yes well enough about bears eh?
    I enjoyed this puzzle from Don but I got stuck at 1a with a world full of minerals and dishes and frankly just pressed cheat.
    Thanks to Eileen for the blog

  25. Thank you, Eileen, needed your fine blog for SOP in SOPHISTRY.

    1961Blanchflower @16: Well, your posts don’t read like a novice I must say. I’m with you…a bit of a jolt after yesterday.

    I enjoyed this, but usually do with this setter.

    New for me were TORAH & APATITE.

    THUMB STALL was neat, as were SCUTTLE & HAPORTH.

    Nice job, Don, thank you.

    Nice week, all.

  26. Usual expect the unexpected fare from Pasquale. There was a time when I could never get on his wavelength but if not exactly easy – first pass, nothing till 26a – I find him a very fair challenge these days.

    Last in BEAR, which only goes to show that the obvious is hiding in plain sight.

  27. I agree that this was scupulously fair and educational but for me it was too much like hard work to be enjoyable. APATITE, MUGGLETONIANS and the spelling BIRIYANI were unfamiliar to me (the Puck was 5 years ago).

    Thanks to pasquale and Eileen

  29. Pasquale, keeping alive the streak of P-named setters, excluding Rufus Mondays, in the Guardian Cryptics of late! I believe we have had a sequence of Paul-Philistine-Picaroon-Paul-Pan and now Pasquale, not to mention a Prize by Puck.
    This was a very enjoyable puzzle, but the LOI for me, HA’PORTH, was a guess that I filled in only from the wordplay and the crossers. I looked it up afterwards and saw it alternatively spelled — or rather, punctuated — as HA’P’ORTH. (A much more challenging word for me than an obvious Americanism such as “handclasp”. Haha!) “SOP” was also a challenge. Here in the US, “SO” for Significant Other is very commonly used, but there is no P or Person typically included in the term. My favorite today was GALLIVANT. Many thanks to Pasquale and Eileen, and to other commenters.

  30. Defeated by the SE – failed on PADDLE, BAIL and WHITEST and HA’PORTH – which I was disappointed not to get as it’s an expression I often use. And I needed Eileen’s help to parse MYSTERY. The rest of it went in more readily than I expect with Pasquale and it was nice to learn of the 9ds and make another HP connection. Thanks to both P & E.

  31. Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen. A challenge but fun. I had no trouble with BEARD or WALLER but like others struggled with the unfamiliar words, did not know SOP or BAIL in cricket, and needed help parsing THUMBSTALL.

  32. Oops, gave away my real name further up, inadvertently. What’s the use of a pseudonym if you don’t use it?

  33. I’m disappointed that no-one has agreed with me that LOCK (also known as “second row” – there are four of them on the pitch, two on each side) is just as good an answer as BAIL – apart from the crossers, of course!

    I doubt if anyone would have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out, Trailman…

  34. Defeated by BEAR and BAIL (despite being a cricket fan) but got there otherwise. Is MUGGLETONIANS without some sort of Harry Potter allusion a case of missing a trick ? Thanks to Pasquale and Eileen.

  35. You can tell how difficult I’ve found a crossword by how late I post. The most difficult since two or three Imogen’s ago. I thought BYRIYANI was pretty close to unfair, even though easily guessable from the definition, “meticulous clueing” not withstanding.

  37. I didn’t have any problem with BIRIYANI. Most curry houses I have visited spell it that way (yes, there are lots of alternatives); it’s also pronounced BI REE YAN EE, so the “biryani” spelling wouldn’t work as well.

  39. MUGGLETONIANS was FOI. I may know nothing about sport but sects and radical movements are meat and drink to me! Which brings me to BAIL which took me as long as the rest of the puzzle to get which, given the two crossers, must be some sort of a record. I liked the rest of this though. No problem with BEAR and WALLER- though I can see why some others didn’t like the latter. Generally good fun.
    Thanks Pasquale.

  40. I totally agree with the prolific muffin @2 and @33 about LOCK. Just as good as BAIL. I just happened to get the crossers first – and to be more attuned to cricket than – to use that frequent abbreviated recourse of setters when cluing sport – to RU.

    Thanks also to 1961Blanchflower @16 for the serious response to what I thought was my serious point @8. (Those were the years, when The Double really meant something – and now the cricket season is too meanly attenuated to allow for the classic cricketer’s double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets: end of digression). Surely white = virtuous is no longer acceptable, any more than ‘nigger’ would be: when was that word last clued? Some online solvers may use the site only for crosswords, and may have more no loyalty to ‘Guardian values’ than to Daily Mail ones – ‘PC gone mad’- but let’s keep up civilised standards here.

  41. I of course meant ‘no more loyalty’ in the penultimate line above @40. Too much haste in the promotion of Guardian values.

  43. White hats/black hats, black ops, whiter than white, white witch/magic, black witch/magic etc. You can’t conflate issues of slavery and race prejudice with a literary binary mechanism. Let’s rebrand Snow White as Snow Orange, maybe?

  46. No wonder I couldn’t solve the SE corner, having put in ^damper^ at 24a. Lack of concentration.
    Thanks to Eileen for the usual meticulous blog, and to Pasquale.

  47. Muffin @33: Too old to help, sadly. When I played rugby, the lock was the No.8 so there would only be 2 of them. They were so called because the ‘locked’ the 2nd row in position and I believe they are still so called in Rugby League. I don’t know when it changed…anyone?

  48. I started this one late today. Easy at the top – offset by a right pig in the South!

    I perfecly agree with Muffin – I had LOCK at 27 almost from the outset – was wondering how on earth RELICTS might fit 21d, while DELIT (a French word?) seemed the only thing to go in 25…..

    One of Ximenes’ unbreakable rules – observed even by Grauniad-style libertarians (or so I thought) is that solutions should be unambiguous – i.e. leading to only one word that fits both the definition and wordplay (or in this case, double def.). Not so for the Don, today. Me no like, sorry!

    And WALLER is dreadful. Is there really such a word? OK, easy wordplay, but to me it’s just a surname (character in the novel Roots, for instance).

    Another incorrect write-in which threw me for a long while – but my fault this time. I had THUMBNAILS at 16/17. Couldn’t see how to parse it though, so was relieved when THUMBSTALL finally clicked! That’s a nice one, Don!

    OK – plenty to enjoy in this one, despite the niggles. Thanks both.

  49. Incidentally, in my school-rugger-playing days (early 1960s), the LOCKs were most definitely the second row of the scrum – hence two of them to each side, four in all. I hated playing in that position – very painful on the ears! But then – I hated playing rugby, full stop….

  50. Waller not so dreadful once phitonelly pointed out the theme. I don’t think that poster has had his/her due. No one else has mentioned it except for one reply.

  51. I failed to solve TAPSTER + APATITE, and of the ones I solved could not fully parse the SOP in SOPHISTRY, or RAG in 13a, plus 19a, 16a, 28a, 27a, 24a. I still do not see why OYSTER = person?

    New words for me were MUGGLETONIANS which I found via google and also THUMB STALL.
    My favourites were GALLIVANT + LEGROOM.

    Thanks Eileen and Pasquale.

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