Enigmatic Variations No. 1307: Classic by Hedge-Sparrow

Chambers defines CLASSIC as, among other things, a great writer or work; a particular horse race; (in plural) Greek or Latin studies; a stylish clothing look. But which of these does Hedge-Sparrow, or Prunella modularis to use the ‘classic’al name, have for us here?

The preamble states that:

“In CLASSIC, an author’s name appears in the bottom row. The remaining outer cells contain a phrase spoken by a character in one of the author’s works (seven words), quoting an earlier author under whose name the quotation appears in ODQ (where one word has an alternative spelling). Unchecked cells in this quotation could give PRAISE FOR TUITION. Each clue contains an additional letter that must be removed before solving; in clue order, these spell a phrase which may aid understanding. Solvers must highlight a thematic place name, and perform an operation suggested by the name of the author’s work. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.”

So we have an author and a work, an ‘earlier’ author, a peripheral quotation and ‘praise for tuition’ – so at a guess we are looking at the literary and/or educational end of those definitions, rather than the gee-gees…

To be honest, I found this hard work to get going – an obvious initial strategy seemed to be to attack those answers giving letters along the bottom row for the author, but not many of them fell too easily. After a couple of fairly sparse sessions, the grid was looking threadbare! Then one sleep-disturbed night at about 2 in the morning, and with no Ashes cricket to depress me, I started again on this puzzle and within an hour had broken the back of it – with the author, the quotation (albeit with some e-help) and most of the extra letters.

We are in the realm of ‘CLASSIC’ as in Latin, with the outer perimeter reading ‘O MIHI PRAETERITOS REFERAT SI JUPITER ANNOS’, from the Aeneid by Virgil (the earlier author, who actually used the form IUPITER), and the extra letters translated this roughly as ‘OH IF ONLY JUPITER WOULD GIVE ME BACK MY PAST YEARS’. Gratefully received help, as my O level Latin from 35 years ago was struggling!

The author is JAMES HILTON, whose most famous, or CLASSIC, work is GOODBYE MR CHIPS, and I believe the Latin phrase is used by Mr Chips in his retirement speech, after 42 years at BROOKFIELD (the thematic place name that needed to be highlighted.) And lastly, the ‘operation’ suggested by the title of the work is to say ‘Goodbye’ to MR CHIPS, who can be found in the leading diagonal.

Phew – a fairly weighty subject and a pretty tough EV, by my reckoning. RHATANY, BASEEJ, SWARAJ, CAPSIAN and FROES were all fairly obscure/unknown to me, and the piecing together of the Latin and/or translated versions of the quotation took some effort. The mental image at 20A, of a clergyman’s wife being chased by a hairy-bottomed Anglican, was hard to shake off!

Educational, challenging and ultimately satisfying just to finally get across the line. A CLASSIC EV, in my opinion, and many thanks to Hedge-Sparrow for the mental tussle.