Guardian Prize 27,657 / Imogen

45 comments on “Guardian Prize 27,657 / Imogen”

1. For the 3rd week running, a tough Prize (by my standards).

   I ‘got’ the theme pretty quickly, having uncovered OLEG (v funny) and SERGEI, before Vladimir Ilyich LENIN

    

   But slow going thereafter, some of the undefined names were hard — and it took recourse to Wikipedia and other lists of popular names to find some, esp TAMARA my LOI ( I didn’t appreciate TAMAR = boundary of Devon and Cornwall, clever but difficult clue).

   I liked IVAN and OLEG especially of the thematic ones, and ICICLES stood out among the non-themed ones – eavesdroppers is a brilliant definition, which I’ve not seen before.

    

   I have a feeling OSAKA is a port city, and thus the definition could extend to “From hence Japanese sailors” — not sure if that makes it semi & lit ?

2. Sorry in my haste to get in ‘First comment’, completely neglected to say Bravo to Imogen for a fine puzzle and thanks to Eileen for explaining it all so well.

3. ThaNKS eILEEN AND VERY GOOD WORK iMOGEN.  Getting OLEG (like epee S above) very early led into the theme and the 8D anagram soon followed; but it was not all plain sailing and DMITRY was last answer of all.  Had to google LALLANS.  Lots to like, including the homosexual teacher.

4. Thanks Eileen and Imogen.
   After 8d, SERGEI led me further. Didn’t get TAMARA.
   Nevertheless good fun.
   Liked ANALGESIC, ANDREI and OLEG..

5. On OSAKA I found, a ref to:
   ‘Hence, burgundy, claret and port’ a Keats poem…I thought ref to port as definition comes from there.

6. https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Hence_burgundy,_claret,_and_port

7. Thanks to Imogen and Eileen. A struggle for me but I did well for the most part but was defeated by the NW corner: ILYA, LALLANS, OSAKA.

8. I thought this was quite difficult, and TAMARA remained unfilled for days despite it being the only match against lists of Russian names, till I finally decided to google ‘tamar’ to see if anything turned up and there it was: the historic boundary river I’d never heard of. Then tonight, coincidentally reading about various British flags and thence Cornwall, I learnt of the establishment of that boundary:

   The Cornovii division of the Dumnonii tribe were separated from the Brythons of Wales after the Battle of Deorham and often came into conflict with the expanding kingdom of Wessex. King Athelstan in AD 936 set the boundary between English and Cornish at the high water mark of the eastern bank of the River Tamar.
   Wikipedia

   OLEG, IVAN and ANALGESIC were funny.

   I didn’t realise it was “1 van”, but thought an ivan was like an iphone (small?). Didn’t think it worked really and pleased to hear the correct parsing, thanks, Eileen.

   The clue for OLEG reminded me of one of my own:

   Hemingway’s double amputation? (1,8,2,4)

   I got into the theme pretty quickly from the straightforward LENIN anagram, which was a mercy (deliberately so, perhaps?).

   Didn’t remember Dee, though I’m sure I’ve heard of him before. Perhaps in another crossword?

   Altogether an enjoyable and educational challenge.

9. Many thanks Eileen for your erudite and charming post. And to Imogen. My only quibble is the ambiguity of 5d. Would Sergey also have been acceptable? There was no way of knowing from the clue. Given this was a prize puzzle, I would feel hard done by if my entry was rejected because I choose the alternative spelling.

10. Thanks to Imogen and Eileen, l also started with Vladimir Lenin and quickly followed with Dmitry, Andrei, Leonid and Nikita all being first names of Soviet presidents. When I couldn’t find a place for Yuri I realised
    the compatriots were simply Russian names. Slowed down after that. Last two in were Osaka and Tamara.

11. Thanks Eileen. Like you and others I was left with gaps in the NW corner for some time. TAMARA was my LOI; never having heard the name before I only got there by counting to ten, realising it had to be a Russian name and resorting to Google. Still not sure about 1a – a long time in cover would be OK but undercover? Like Tony @8 I rationalised IVAN as being similar to iPhone, iPod etc but also like him prefer your explanation.

12. Much like others above re Tamar, only guessed it reading Eileen’s preamble, and due to miscount looking for another name delayed icicles (eavesdroppers is neat, tho used before I fancy). Dnk the fell running sport, or lallans (surely not, I thought, but there it was!), and dnp czardom, tho card for eccentric, or comic, is a regular. Wondered about ‘under’ as envelope indicator in Leonid.

    All good fun, and much kinder than yesterday’s Enig! Thanks Imogen and Eileen.

13. Crossed with Biggles A re in/under and also didn’t stop to think that ‘i’ doesn’t mean tiny (eg iMac).

14. What an excellent Prize; Imogen never fails to delight.

    I was another Apple van parsifier, which I like better than Eileen’s more correct parsing. LALLANS was a guess from the bottom up, never having heard of that language. Many chuckles, starting with OLEG, my favourite. – short clues can often be the cleverest. Other gems were ILYA, SERGEI, and especially OSAKA – brilliant.

    Thank you Imogen for the pleasure, and Eileen for your always illuminating blogs.

     

15. Enjoyed this multilingual/multinational  offering. Very chancy cluing homophones  in foreign languages but I think Sergei works for an anglophone, although maybe not for a native speaker. Learnt something about Lallans. Didn’t know the county boundary, but that’s okay, one of the delights of doing crossies across the globe. TILT.

    OSAKA had to be for the AKA and the Japanese, but despite Eileen and Ilippu’s help I just don’t get it.

     

16. Many thanks for your blog, Eileen.It put me right on one thing (that being that I cant count)

    I am a huge fan of Shostakovich and i always think DMITRI so DRY didnt even enter my head-I probably wrote in Smithy with a question mark.

    And thanks Imogen.

17. Thanks Eileen, I enjoyed most of this but struggled on the last few which needed your help. I think I have missed an explanation for the definition of 2dn, OSAKA. Osaka is certainly a port city, but wouldn’t that angle suggest ‘whence’?

18. ‘Hence, perhaps Japanese’ surely just means that natives of Osaka are most likely Japanese. Nothing to do with the port. ‘sailor: his other name’ is the definition.

19. Thanks Imogen ans Eileen

    I put this aside unfinished and never came back to it. Of course, I wasn’t helped by having an unparsed ANASTASIA at 14d. I was brought up in Devon, so I did know TAMAR, though.

20. Feeling pleased with myself for not finding this too difficult, only to realise that for my LOI I’d banged in OLGA instead of ILYA.
    I’d also thought it was the Japanese sailor who came from OSAKA, but I now see that Eileen’s parsing is better, though the clue is definitely &littish.
    No problems with the Tamar, as I have friends who live near a particularly beautiful stretch of it.
    A lovely weekend crossword – thanks to Imogen and Eileen.

21. Hi ilippu @5 and 6

    Thanks for the poem – that one wasn’t in our A Level syllabus! ‘Hence’ in the poem is an archaic interjection: Begone! Away! [Chambers and Collins] and so, as Biggles A says @18, nothing to do with port [but I think, Biggles A, you meant that ‘sailor: his other name’ is the wordplay, not the definition].

22. I crossed with g larsen.

23. Thanks again Eileen. Yes, of course. Sorry about that.

24. I now remember thinking at the time that the name VLADIMIR LENIN felt strangely unfamiliar for someone so well-known. That is because he intended Lenin to be an alias for his whole name, not simply his surname, and wanted to be referred to be referred to by that one word. (Although according to Wikipedia he occasionally referred to himself as N. Lenin when he thought he needed a moniker). In general people seem to have followed his wishes and just used the one name, though you can find plenty of references to its use with his first name.

    Not helpful in the context of a crossword based on Russian first names!

25. Like many, I got 8dn as my 2ndOI which made the theme easy, but not the clues! Some of them I found positively fiendish. Indeed I failed to get 1dn having quite missed LANS and got stuck on LINES which got me nowhere, and I had TAMARA listed as a possible but didn’t put it in because I too didn’t spot the TAMAR as a county boundary. Which was pretty silly as I knew very well that it was. I did have a little quibble with 1ac because I wanted the long time to be the last three letters as suggested by UNDER but, hey, an excellent puzzle for which thank you Imogen and, indeed, Eileen

26. I found it wquite difficult to get going on this puzzle.  FOI was CLASSIFIED and then the SW corner opened up.

    Was held up for a while by wanting to put INFARCT for 3dn.

    I was held up with the name TAMARA (my last name in) partly because of the Infarct mistake and also because all the others were male names and by then I was only looking for men’s names.

    The only real problem was 12 ac as I didn’t know Dee as the astrologer but got it worked out from the wordplay in the end.

    Many thanks to Imogen and to Eileen.

27. I thought that I had already got 10 names when I came to 11a as my LOI so I wasn’t looking for a Russian name and missed TAMARA though I did know that the Tamar is a county boundary. Regrettably this has set up St Louis Blues as an earworm. You know the verse I mean – it begins “Feeling Tamara the way I feel today. As they say in these parts “I’ll get my coat”.
    Thanks to Imogen and Eileen

28. I solved this without access to any sort of reference material while on the train to London last week and am quite pleased that I solved the whole thing apart from Tamara

    Thanks to Imogen and Eileen

29. Thank you Imogen for a fun puzzle and Eileen for a super blog.

    I don’t think I would have parsed IVAN if I had not already twigged to OLEG, what laughs!  I had to google LALLANS and DEE.

    The clue for ICICLES was great, but rather sinister, they can certainly transport you silently to the unknown, one has to be very careful in winter when walking along a pavement in some cities on the Continent…

30. I thought this an excellent puzzle and one which I thoroughly enjoyed. Not too easy but, once I’d got VLADIMIR LENIN, a steady solve. I did think that the names would be of Russian revolutionaries but that went out of the window almost immediately. TAMARA was LOI and I’ve lived in the West country for forty years. I had some trouble with OSAKA too which,in retrospect,was one of the easier clues.
    So different from yesterday’s ENIGMATIST which took me hours even using every aid I could think of. However, Imogen played a blinder!

31. @g larsen,

    I agree “Vladimir Lenin” sounds odd, but I think that’s because when he’s not simply referred to as Lenin, it’s usually “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, isn’t it?

    Btw Ilych is a patronymic meaning “son of Ilya”. Anyone else know the name Ilya from Ilya Kuyakin (or rather, Illya, as I find his name was spelled)?

    @Jaydee, “under” for the last three letters wouldn’t be considered good cluing for an across answer.

32. Hi Tony @31 – from your link:’ McCallum’s blond good looks and the enigmatic persona he created for the character garnered him a huge following of female fans.’ I was one. 😉

33. *Illya Kuryakin*

    Obviously there’s no “correct” way to spell Ilya/Illya, as it’s properly written in Cyrillic script and rendered phonetically into our alphabet (same as Sergei/Sergey, but without the implications for this puzzle noted by MirrorBoy, above).

34. Eileen (we crossed). I also thought of IK as the more glamorous of the two partners-in-arms, though for me he provoked no stirrings in the nether regions!

35. Thanks to Imogen and Eileen. I am another who found this tough and was defeated in the NW. All the rest fine but the 4 in the extreme NW totally defeated me. I knew tamar because I used to live in a place where I could see the tamar bridge from my front window. However, I jest could not get into the others. I liked Oleg, Ivan and analgesic and I am sure we have had aspartame recently in another puzzle. Thanks again to Imogen and Eileen.

36. Hi PetHay @35 – Boatman 27,485: After a dispute, subdue with sweetener (9)

37. Thanks, Eileen, for setting me right. Here I was thinking, I must be a genius!

38. @9 MirrorBoy – the co-founder of Google agrees with you. Pretty sure both spellings would be accepted.

39. I was confused at the time by the OSAKA clue, but it seems fair enough now, even though it relies on the archaic meaning of hence as “from here”.  My first thought, looking at the crossers, was OXANA which looked like a winner based on the theme, but it wouldn’t parse.  This led to identifying TAMARA as the last themer.  I see now OXANA is probably more Ukrainian than Russian, so perhaps that’s why it wasn’t used.  Early on, I wondered at 9a if VOGT (from Two Gentlemen of Verona) might have a Russian connection.

    I was beaten by DEEP-LAID, having no knowledge of the astrologer and failing to spot PLAID.  The rest of the puzzle went in quite smoothly.  I liked the hiding of PSYCHO, the definition for PRICE TAGS and the surface for CANDLELIT.

    There’s a bit of a counter-espionage aura surrounding the puzzle overall, with CLASSIFIED, DEEP-LAID, the spies in SOCIAL, the Eavesdroppers and all the Russians.  Perhaps that inspired the theme.

    Good fun overall.  Thanks, Imogen and Eileen.

40. Found this one pretty tough, especially the NW corner, with ILYA last in (took a long time to remember the right play). TAMARA also took longer than it should have because I stupidly assumed that the names were all male.

    Thanks to Imogen and Eileen

41. I didn’t warm to this prize, largely because I kept hoping it was about something more than just picking from a random list of names, and left it mostly unread until later in the week.

    Coming back to it I spent a long time trying to reconcile the obvious wordplay with the odd definition in 2d, the best I could come up with was that maybe it was a clumsy way to say ‘a Japanese person might come from here’ which seemed ridiculously weak so I figured that it was just beyond me.

    Came here to be enlightened only to discover that it really is the worst definition in a long time (or just beyond everyone else as well).

    Thanks to Imogen and Eileen.

42. I missed TAMARA because I counted GREGORY as one of the 10 names in the theme, so was not looking for another at the end. I would never have figured out Tamar as “county boundary” anyway; way too UK-centric for me.

43. Anyone notice the symmetry of the names in the grid?

44. I gave up on this one after I had identified the theme and lost interest. Turns out that my guess was narrower than it should have been – led astray by googling oleg and sergei together and finding a certain Meerkat family in the results   ……

45. @Trovatore,

    Ben’ trovato! That could have helped Greg (but so could googling ‘tamar’, as I did!)

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