Recommended, even if you don’t usually do the Tuesday FT.
A very classy puzzle this morning. Tortuous – dare I say Serpentine – clueing and some very devious surfaces and constructions. Oh, and the boundary squares are jolly as well, although not thematic, as far as I can see.
Many thanks to Basilisk for a little corker.
| Across | ||
| 1 | POETRY | American who wrote essay in verse (6) |
| Edgar Allan POE (‘American who wrote’) + TRY (to ‘essay’). | ||
| 4 | IN MOTION | Popular writer in verse is moving (2,6) |
| IN (‘popular’) + Andrew MOTION (ex-laureate, ‘writer in verse’). | ||
| 10 | AGITATING | Disturbing process over time inspires French director (9) |
| AGI.ING (‘process over time’) includes Jacques TATI. | ||
| 11 | PRISM | Shape the doctrine of public relations? (5) |
| An ‘-ism’ may be said to be a doctrine. Thus a ‘doctrine of Public Relations’ might be a PR ISM’. Just about. | ||
| 12 | ALTO | Key character that’s central to authorial voice (4) |
| ALT (computer ‘key’) + O (central letter of ‘authOrial’). | ||
| 13 | PARANORMAL | Irrational double standard reinforcing a vacuous appeal (10) |
| PAR + NORM (both ‘standards’) surround (‘reinforce’) A + ‘AppeaL’, emptied, as it were. | ||
| 15 | TENANCY | Property right in the heart of westerly French city (7) |
| Centre of ‘wesTErly’ + NANCY (‘Fr. city’). | ||
| 16 | DORSAL | Relating to the back part of pilchard or salmon (6) |
| Today’s first &lit. Inclusion in ‘pilcharD OR SALmon’. | ||
| 19 | RECESS | Timeless secrets could be hidden here (6) |
| Anagram (‘could be’) of SECREtS minus T[ime], w whole clue def. Whether this is an &lit is in the eye of the solver. I rather think it is. | ||
| 21 | TSUNAMI | Yorkshire newspaper writer’s article about cause of flooding (7) |
| T’ being the still widespread & exclusively Yorkshire abbreviation for ‘the’, we have T’ SUN (thus ‘Yorkshire newspaper’) then I’M (”the writer’s”) + A (‘article’), reversed. Neat and timely clue. | ||
| 23 | ESPECIALLY | Particularly unusual places I see houses (10) |
| Anagram (‘unusual’) of PLACES I, ‘housed’ by the favourite crossword bishopric (‘see’) of ELY. | ||
| 25 | AGOG | Keen to know more about fellows shrouded in cigarette smoke (4) |
| ‘Cigarette smoke’, in Britain at any rate, might be ‘fAG fOG’. Hide the FF (‘fellows’). | ||
| 27 | OWNED | Wife beset by heartless and capricious demon is possessed (5) |
| W[ife] surrounded by anagram (‘capricious’) of ‘DEmON’ minus central letter. | ||
| 28 | PROFESSOR | One who claims poor serfs must be radicalised (9) |
| Anagram (‘radicalised’) of POOR SERFS. | ||
| 29 | TREASURE | Tramp trades daughter for guaranteed value (8) |
| TREAd (‘tramp’), its D[aughter] replaced by SURE (‘guaranteed’). | ||
| 30 | ISLAND | Diesel banned at regular intervals in Greenland? (6) |
| Alternate letters of ‘dIeSeL bAnNeD’. | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | PEASANTS | They may be left out of congenial society (8) |
| L[eft] subtracted from P{l}EASANT (‘congenial’) + S[society], again with whole clue def or &lit, au choix. |
||
| 2 | EXISTENCE | Life model entices ex (9) |
| Anagram (‘model’) of ENTICES EX. | ||
| 3 | ROAM | Memory burdened by amnesia’s beginning to wander (4) |
| ROM (computer ‘memory’) contains 1st of ‘Amnesia’. | ||
| 5 | NIGGARD | Going on and on endlessly about mean individual (7) |
| DRAGGINg (‘going on & on’), curtailed & reversed. | ||
| 6 | OPPROBRIUM | Expert on Britain involved in drug scandal (10) |
| PRO (‘expert’) + BR[itain] in OP.IUM | ||
| 7 | IDIOM | Fool with no time to get married in characteristic style (5) |
| IDIOt + M[arried]. | ||
| 8 | NIMBLE | Swift upset leaders of Enlightenment by mercilessly lampooning new ideas (6) |
| Anagram (‘upset’) of 1st letters of last 6 words. | ||
| 9 | BIGAMY | Several engagements may result in this large armed force eliminating resistance (6) |
| BIG ArMY without R[esistance]. | ||
| 14 | INTERCEDES | Pleads with top players for audience south of Bury (10) |
| INTER (‘bury’) + homophone (‘for audience’) of ‘seeds’ (top players) | ||
| 17 | ANALGESIA | Effect of numbers entering system unsettled most of East Anglia (9) |
| Anagram (‘unsettled’) of EASt ANGLIA, less the T, i.e., most of it. Fair enough, even if convention usually loses the last letter in such a construction. ‘Numb-ers’, of course. | ||
| 18 | FINGERED | The result of transitioning if gender is manipulated digitally (8) |
| Anagram (‘the result of transitioning’) of IF GENDER. | ||
| 20 | SCARPER | Produce a mark for each go in some haste (7) |
| Product of SCAR (‘a mark’) + PER (‘for each’). | ||
| 21 | TALLOW | Admit (after a bit of thought) it get’s on one’s wick (6) |
| ALLOW after T(hought) w cryptic def. | ||
| 22 | REVOLT | Rising anger topped scale of potential differences (6) |
| iRE (‘anger’, decapitated) + VOLT (‘scale of potential differences’). I knew ‘O’ level physics would be of use some day. | ||
| 24 | PENCE | Writer suppressing case for climate change (5) |
| PEN (‘writer’) atop outside letters of ‘ClimatE’. | ||
| 26 | LESS | Part of course that’s not supported by bar (4) |
| LESSon (‘part of course’) without ON (i.e. not ON, therefore ‘not supported by’, if you see what I mean). Tortuous, but I think that’s it. ‘Bar’ in the sense of ‘minus’ or, indeed, ‘without’. | ||
Doh! There I was looking for hidden gems like OGLERS, NOSY, MOON and missed the bleedin bovious.
Nice one as usual Jason-thanks and to you GB
Thanks B and Grant! I indeed fell down on decoding a few — thanks for putting me out of my misery. Couldn’t work out wp for Yorkshire’s TSUNAMI, fag’s AGOG and French TENANCY (since NANCY is indeed in the west, I didn’t separate and lift). Completely failed to solve LESS.
Mild shock no complaints about “get’s” in 21a.
I missed LESS as well, couldn’t parse AGOG and had ‘scamper’ for SCARPER, so definitely one up to Basilisk.
I liked the &lits and the peripheral answers, whatever their significance. Favourite was the misdirection of the surface for 8d.
Thanks to Basilisk and Grant
Thought this was marvellous. So many crafty and deceptive clues. Like others, I failed to get LESS (and am not ashamed to have done so).
17d, you need to read “most of” as going with just “East”, so it is just the last letter missing.
Thanks to Basilisk and Grant.
To Hovis@4:
Re 17d, yup, thought of that, but it doesn’t fetch ANGLIA into the anagram fodder; you need to squeeze in an ‘and’ or something to join ‘em up & make it go if that’s your construction and I don’t think it’s necessary.
I had this conversation in loonapick’s blog last week: in both cases, you’re just invited to create a string of letters and then take something out, no big deal. (Loony’s setter then joined in a tiny bit sniffily to confirm).
And btw LESS cost me blood and I’m still not 100% on it.
Grant @5. Afraid it still works for me. I guess we all have different views as to what works and what doesn’t. For me it is an anagram (unsettled) of EAS ANGLIA where EAS is most of EAST. All you need (to me) is an insertion of a pause in reading between EAST & ANGLIA. I’m sure we can both see our different views so we can agree to disagree. I think it reasonably safe to assume Basilisk didn’t mean to remove a random letter by using “most of” (although, I have to admit, I have seen this done by at least one other setter).
Yup, again. I take the point of course but it’s an ‘am-I-boverred?’ moment in a really enjoyable crossword.
I’d still like to get some confirmation of LESS, though. I p’raps shd have given the example of something like ‘all bar one’.
Enough!
I have a particular admiration for bloggers of the FT where there is no “reveal” option when you’re not sure. (And when it’s an IO – hoo boy!) Given all the different meanings for “course” and “bar” with just ?E?S, I just gave up. I think LESS works very well so much congrats on coming up with that. Hopefully Basilisk will confirm but it has my vote.
Many thanks for the excellent blog and to everyone who has commented.
I can confirm that Grant has the correct solution and parsing for LESS. Tough clue, now I look at it again!
(And apologies for the rogue apostrophe in 21d.)
Lots of lovely sneaky snakiness – if only I’d spotted the Nina
Thanks to Basilisk and Grant
I too was defeated by 26d, entering TEES as a something on a [golf] course, but with no real conviction and unparsed of course. Thanks to Basilisk @10 for confirming Grant’s parsing – although I’m still not quite seeing how ‘ON’ is indicated as subtraction fodder if ‘not supported by’ indicates the actual subtraction.
As for the rest: well I struggled to get going at first, but once I did… wow! My absolute favourite was the lovely &lit DORSAL. Although as a Yorkshireman – and a big fan of the Uxbridge English Dictionary – T’SUN made me laugh out loud, so that came in a close second.
Oh and I completely missed the perimeter connections until I got the very last one, IN MOTION. I almost never spot Ninas, themes, connections, etc.
Thanks to all.
Angstony @ 12
The way I see 26 the wordplay is LESSON ‘not’ (minus) ‘supported by’ (ON)
Nice puzzle. Thanks Basilisk and GB.
Simon @ 13 — That is a very good explanation.
I liked the puzzle but was not a fan of that clue. I entered TEES and think it’s possible to get that answer in the wordplay. If you take the word THAT and subtract the bar, barrier, boundary, in the center (ha, which some dictionaries say is the same as ha-ha, but I don’t know if they mean only for the laugh because I’ve never heard ha-ha or ha in a sentence used for a sunken barrier), you are left with two T’s or TEES.
To Angstony@12:
Now that our revered setter, bless him, has been on to confirm & elucidate, I think that the key phrase in 26d LESS is ‘supported by’.
If you can accept that ‘supported by’ means ‘on’ as in e.g. ‘the bird is on the wire’, ‘Jim’s on benefits’, ‘I’m on tenterhooks’ &c, then its opposite is ‘(that’s) not supported by’ and all the rest follows. But, Cripes, it wasn’t easy and, tbh, I still think it’s a bit stretchy as evidently does Basilisk.
Fun, though.
Simon @13 and Grant @15: Thanks, that makes a lot more sense to me now.
ub @14: Now that is convoluted!
A nit-pick, 10a should read AGI.NG not AGI.ING. It was the only answer I got wrong as I had ANIMATING for “disturbing process” which I partially parsed as MATI is the first name of a French movie director but could not deal with ani.ng. A fun puzzle Thanks to Bazilisk and Grant.
Thanks Grant — there were a half dozen I couldn’t parse — some I should have (POETRY, BIGAMY) but I never would have seen LESS. Nonetheless, I enjoyed most of this crossword esp. ALTO, PRISM, and ANALGESIA. Thanks Basilisk.
Strangely, I got the tricky LESS but was only beaten by REVOLT(I wrote REPORT)
full disclosure: in my comment about Nancy being in the west (of France) is completely wrong (I was confusing it with Nantes) — so I was doubly wrong.
Thanks for the blog, Grant Baynham. Despite solving almost all of this, I found it too tortuous to be enjoyable.
The clueing of 25 & 26 was OTT IMHO.