Financial Times 17,025 by IO

by

Phew…

Probably the hardest puzzle I've had to blog. Crossword-themed and including two works I'd not heard of, although they do sound fun.

An awful lot of playful if not shamelessly illegal flouting of convention, obscurities and dubious definitions.

Vicious indeed for a mid-weeker, and I doubt I'd have finished if I wasn't blogging. There are still a couple I'd like help with.

IO is never easy, but he's excelled himself this time. Gee thanks, mate.

picture of the completed grid

ACROSS
7 ROUSSE
Port intoxicated Roger Squires? Nothing odd in that (6)

Anagram of even-numbered letters of 'rOgEr SqUiReS', the thematic tributee of today's puzzle. Ile Rousse is a commercial port in southern France, serving Corsica.
9 ANSWERER
In reply he says Araucarians were rather welcoming (8)

Included in 'araucariANS WERE Rather'.
10 LEFT-HANDER
With A-one flying, embattled Fleet Air Arm section captured “sinister” individual (4-6)

Anagram ('embattled') of FLEET aiR (minus A1) includes HAND ('arm section').
11 SHIP
First to serve in seagoing vessel (4)

1st of S{erve} + HIP (trendy, 'in').
12 IDENTICAL TWIN
After first of illusions bamboozled, I’d then let cat out of the bag – and one of two peas! (9,4)

I (=1st of 'Illusions') then anagram of 'ID theN LET CAT' minus letters of THE + WIN ('to 'bag'). Peas in a pod, obvs.
14 NICTATE
Solve Church Times (2,2) in a blink? (7)

Anagram ('solve') of CE ('church') + 2 X T[imes] + AIN + A.
17 FACTOR ?
I’ll help clot do a bit of overtime loading partly digital cargo (6,1)

It is in fact FACTOR 8, the blood-clotting protein, but my s/w doesn't allow digits. ACT ('do') + 1st of O[vertime} in FR8, i.e. FR + EIGHT, spelt partly digitally. Wicked.
19
See 16
23 CUSP
The point in spell of “hocus-pocus!” (4)

Included in the spelling of 'hoCUS Pocus'.
24 IRONSTONES
Plastered resins on to raw materials for Shropshire bridge? (10)

Anagram ('plastered') of 'RESINS ON TO'. Ref. the world's first iron bridge in, er, Ironbridge, Salop, not coincidentally the home of Roger Squires… Good luck to the old structure in this weather.
25 REBELLED
See perimeter of grid, reading from stern of boat (8)

Reversed in the perimeter from the '8' (a rowing 'boat', presumably) is a crossword clue and title of a crossword-themed book by Sandy Balfour: 'Pretty girl in crimson rose (8)' = BELLE in R.ED, definition 'rose' = rebelled.
26 ALECTO
Fury exposed Dalek facing triad of Doctors (6)

dALEk without outside letters ('exposed') + 3 letters of 'doCTOrs'. One of the Greek 'furies'. You knew that.
DOWN
1 ISATIN
This stuff’s newspaper material! (6)

'I' (the newspaper) + SATIN. 'A substance obtained by oxidising indigo'. Who knew? Certainly not me.
2 GELATI
Below-average Latin? You need some refresher courses! (6)

Hidden in '-averaGE LATIn' w cryptic def of ice-creams.
3 YARDMAN
Take in a Monday cryptic for old rail employee? (7)

Not sure this isn't an error. 'R' = 'take' ( as in 'recipe'). An anagram ('cryptic') of MANDAY around it would work, but it ain't there. You could have MON (Scots for 'man') but that would be illegal. Unless 'A' is replacing 'O[ld] in the anagram fodder, though the wordplay is iffy for that. And there's a spare 'A' anyway. Thoughts welcome.
4 TSARITSA
Cruciverbalist ultimately lifted up as “royal” (8)

No idea of the parsing. You've got the last of 'cruciverbalisT' and 'AS' reversed but apart from that…
5 TEE SHIRT
Top setter, broke, accepts his cut (3,5)

Anagram ('broke') of SETTER contains 'HIs', shortened.
6 EERIE
Scary – taking off south, observer starts to identify enemy (5)

sEER ('observer', minus S[outh]) + 1st letters of 'I{dentify] E{nemy}.
8 OVERDO IT
“Produce even more crosswords?!” (And you’ve nothing against new editor?) (6,2)

0 ('nothing') + V[ersus] ('against') + anagram ('new') of EDITOR.
13 BRIEFEST
Description of Dante’s clues – or a celebration of French cheese? (8)

DANTE is the nom-de-plume of crossword compiler Roger Squires, qv, renowned for the conciceness of his setting.

15 TONE POEM
A petty officer joined up to cover work (4,4)

ONE ('a') P[etty] O[fficer] inside reversal of ME.T ('joined').
16, 19 TWO GIRLS ONE ON EACH KNEE
A Cap for Anna and a Cap for Tamsin? Cryptic book title (3,5,3,2,4,4)

Cryptically, 'Pat' and 'Ella' – 2 girls – give patella, of which one has one on each knee. This is the title of one of today's two crossword themed books, this by Alan Connor.

18 SECONDO
Lower part of two banks of Severn colonised by Green Party (7)

Musical expression. Outsiders of 'SeverN' include ECO ('green'), then DO ('party').
20 CT SCAN
Picture exploits liberating a vessel (2,4)

aCTS ('exploits') minus 'A' + CAN ('vessel'). Very skinny definition, I think.
21 KRONER
What N European pays King Roger up front? A pound note (6)

K[ing] + 1st of R{oger} + ONER (= one-er, single pound on the pattern of 'fiver' & 'tenner').
22 AUREI
Old gold Indy’s No 1 put on a banker at Ripon? (5)

A + URE (river, 'banker', in Ripon) + 1st of I{ndy}. Roman gold coins.

33 comments on “Financial Times 17,025 by IO”

  1. I have no idea about the parsing of 4d but I think I can help with 3d

    The rail employee is a current one so you can replace the O for Old in anagram (cryptic) of MONDAY with A (from the clue) plus R (take – as used in old prescriptions

    I always think of IO as John’s ‘solver’friendliest’ alter ego but not today. This was an extremely difficult crossword but clever and enjoyable, once I’d returned from the obligatory lie-down-in-a-darkened room to look at it all again

    Happy Birthday Rufus and thanks to IO and well done to Grant – not one I’d have wanted to blog

  2. I read YARDMAN slightly differently having R (take) replacing O.

    4d is simply T (Cruciverbalist finally) + reversal of ASTIR (up) + AS.

    Was on IO’s wavelength today for a change so managed to finish having to check a couple of unknowns.

  3. Thanks Io and Grant
    25ac: I think “reading from stern of boat” means starting with the last letter of SHIP at 11ac, and therefore ending with the figure 8.

  4. I meant to ask where your “Pat & Ella” came from in 16/19. Seem to be better choices than Anna & Tamsin mind you. I just read “Cap” as knee-cap giving a girl on each knee.

    The use of the Nina as a cryptic clue in 25a was ingenious, I thought.

  6. I saw the name Io on the puzzle and, since it’s a weekday and I had lots to do, I gave the puzzle a miss – and I’m sorry now. Given the theme, I wish I’d given it a go but probably wouldn’t have got very far.

    Just to chip in my two-hap’orth, re 16,19: Roger’s wife’s name is Anna and he has a stepdaughter, Tamsin.

  7. Very, very hard. I ended up missing 1a, which I’d never heard of as a ‘Port’, FACTOR 8 and 25a. ISATIN, although correct, was a semi-guess from the wordplay. Goodness knows where I would have been without the peripheral Nina (even if I had no idea what it was all about) which helped with quite a few. I parsed 3d and 4d as per Hovis above.

    No prizes for guessing which of the two similarly themed crosswords today was the harder!

    Thanks to Grant and Io

  8. To Hovis @4:
    Well played. ASTIR is bloomin’ obvious, once you know. Damn. Still not clear about the wordplay in YARDMAN, but heigh-ho.
    ‘Pat & Ella’ was a chestnut which I happened to recall.
    And to Pelham Barton @3:
    You’re obviously right about ‘shiP’.
    All of which means that this was a technical DNF for me. Just glad to have got the blog out. Took hours.

  9. Hovis@4 The two girls one on each knee’ was Roger Squires’ two-millionth clue which is why Alan Connor used it as the title for his book

  12. Well, perhaps if I had even solved 1 million clues, this absorbing tribute would make sense!
    As it is, I can only sit back and admire.

  14. Inspired puzzle, though in combo with the Guardian I think it’s all a bit barmy.
    A few write-ins (the patella book, identical twin) plus the perimeter clue which I knew made this not too hard, but great tricks. The Enigmatist puzzle earlier this month had TSARITSA with basically the same parsing, so that one went in quick too.
    Happy twosday, everyone

  15. Big thumbs down from this solver.

    An ego trip by setter and indulgence by crossword editor.

    It wrong to set such impossible puzzles for a minuscule proportion of their readership.

    As an FT subscriber I am unimpressed.

  17. It was certainly way beyond me but last week we had several puzzles I romped through. In view of impressive career of Roger Squires I think we could indulge the setter on this special occasion?

  18. I understand your point SM, but the Dante puzzles I solved were always fair and doable. And the Telegraph is definitely doable. I don’t know Rufus.

    This one seemed to be in a different league of difficulty – very hard for expert solvers judging by the comments.

    I can’t see how that’s a tribute to RS and it caused me to waste an hour of my life.

    I can’t see that because some puzzles were straightforward last week – maybe too straightforward- that that justifies printing a stinker. Surely consistency for the readers of the FT is what should be provided – In other words, knowing when you start a puzzle that you’ve got a reasonable chance of finishing it. I could’ve been here in till next Christmas and I wouldn’t have finished this one.

  19. I quite understand you point of view Moly@18. The FT has widely varying degrees of difficulty in their puzzles which I now accept. On the positive side, exposure to puzzles outside one’s comfort zone can improve your solving skills. It has mine.

    That said today’s puzzle was off the scale in difficulty. Luckily I was very busy today so gave up fairly soon. There is always tomorrow !

  20. To riff on Moly’s point @15 and 18, since this was supposedly a tribute to Rufus, surely IO could have constructed a Rufusian puzzle. Vulcan/Imogen did precisely that in today’s Grauniad.

    To many of us for whom Rufus puzzles were doable and fun, with humorous wordplay, this one was none of the above. Not a very apt tribute for the benefit of Rufus fans.

    Thanks anyway for the thought, and thanks Grant for your valiant effort with the blog.

  23. Thanks Io and Grant. Managed to get all but one: 17a, FACTOR 8. I did not enjoy this crossword, as the surfaces seemed contrived to the point of being tortuous. Even when I got a solution, such as 1d ISATIN or 7a ROUSSE, I didn’t feel like it was worth the struggle. There’s a port Rousse in Canada, btw, and I assumed that was the one meant.

    What puzzled me the most was the perimeter clue. Why reuse word for word such a well-known clue? I assume it was Rufus’s originally, but still.

  24. I thought the “scenic route” by IO along with Vulcan’s freeway combined to make a perfect celebration of the Shropshire Lad
    Thanks for the blog on this.I needed it

  25. As a long term Guardian solver I must confess I could not stand puzzles by Rufus, no reflection on the man himself of course , just my personal solving style. I have also tried many Enigmatist puzzles so the style of this was quire familiar.
    I just want to pick up on the points from Moly and SM, when I was learning there were setters such as Bunthorne and Fidelio who seemed impossible and I see Moly’s frustration but as SM says , it is always worth trying the harder setters as you learn a lot more. Sometimes the setter will defeat us but we live to solve another day.

  26. I don’t know what to make of this puzzle. I found some of the clues very “try hardish” for want of a better term. I’m sorry but I just can’t appreciate clues like FACTOR8 and CT SCAN.

  27. Crypticsue@9: that’s an astonishing total, representing an uninterrupted rate of 1 clue every N minutes for 8 hours per day, 5 days a week over 16N years. Of course N will vary per setter, but with polishing, checking, acting on test-solvers’ and then editors’ feedback, it might easily average out between 5 and 10 minutes per clue, i.e. at best 80 years of non-stop 40-hour weeks .. or, of course, 40 unbroken years of non-stop 80-hour weeks!

  28. Great effort on the blog Grant! A very hard puzzle indeed.

    Given that Rufus/Dante puzzles were at the easy-end of the difficulty spectrum it seems a bit of a shame that the tribute puzzle would right up there at the very top end. It excludes many of those solvers who would have been Rufus/Dante stalwarts. Nothing wrong in difficult puzzles in the FT per se, but in this case it seem ill-fitting.

  29. Too much on yesterday, hosting an AGM, so just got round to this after lunch today.
    Failed to complete 17a and 20d, but no complaints from me.
    Thanks to GB and Hovis@2 for the parsing of 12a and 4d, and thanks to JH for the puzzle, a real toughie.

  31. CLHK@22,

    Pelham referenced this in his comment @8. The answer to 11a is SHIP. On the grid, you start from the letter P ( in SHIP, stern of the boat i.e. back ) and then move anticlockwise around the grid on the perimeter – it spells out a celebrated clue “pretty girl in crimson” which is solved as per Grant’s parsing.

    I barely made it past half the grid before throwing my hands up. 🙂

    Cheers,
    TL

  32. I got about 6 clues in this and then just decided to look at the blog and enjoy the solutions and references. Thanks, Grant and all the other commenters who explained.

  33. Thanks Io and Grant
    Put this one off for a while to prepare the brain for the upcoming attack and after a week of coming back to my last two clues, still failed – made the mistake with the nina by thinking that it was A PRETTY GIRL … instead of it finishing with IN CRIMSON ROSE (8) – and that was after googling the book and it was in plain sight !!! Then didn’t realise that it was the clue that the title was the final clue to be solved instead of biffing REVEALED.
    A very tough solve, but that is what we have come to expect from this setter and as is usual all clues were purely solvable – just required the right knowledge and the right logic to work the word play.
    Thought that it was a great acknowledgement of Roger’s 90th birthday, even if the difficulty factor was poles apart from his puzzles – only embellished by the other hidden snippets – names of his wife / step-daughter, etc.

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