Thank you to Kite. Definitions are underlined in the clues.
I can’t parse one.
Across
9 At age close to retirement, Ivy fit to have sex toys (5-4)
SIXTY-FIVE : Anagram of(… toys) [IVY FIT plus(to have) SEX].
10 Queen’s retired getting something to go (5)
SENNA : Reversal of(… retired) [ANNE(former Queen of Great Britain) ’S ].
Defn: A laxative to make you go/evacuate your bowels.
11 One tooth at the back extracted in Italian city (5)
IMOLA : I(Roman numeral for “one”) + “molar”(a tooth at the back of the mouth) minus its last letter(at the back extracted).
12 Exchange of opinions in bad-tempered attack (9)
CROSSFIRE : CROSS(bad-tempered/annoyed) + FIRE(to attack/to blast).
Defn: …/a debate.
13 Relations relaxed in shelter that river surrounds (7)
DETENTE : TENT(a portable shelter) contained in(that … surrounds) DEE(river in Great Britain).
Defn: … or relaxed relations, especially between countries.
14 Recipe to make rum loaf? (7)
FORMULA : Anagram of(to make) RUM LOAF.
17 Traps with ensnared amphibians (5)
NEWTS : NETS(traps/snares) containing(… ensnared) W(abbrev. for “with”).
19 Port from Uruguay region (3)
AYR : Hidden in(from) “Uruguay region”.
Defn: … on the southwest coast of Scotland.
20 Ant right to get cosmetic preparation (5)
TONER : TONE(Ant??) + R(abbrev. for “right”).
21 Sexy Malcolm’s crew collecting limousine with ladies initially inside (7)
MCLAREN : MEN(crew/a group of workers) containing(collecting) [ CAR(limousine/motor vehicle) containing(with … inside) 1st letter of(… initially) “ladies” ].
Defn: Last name of Malcolm, the manager and promoter of the punk rock group, the Sex Pistols, hence ….
22 Doctor’s companion left stopping impatient motorist (7)
BLEEPER : L(abbrev. for “left”) contained in(stopping) BEEPER(one who beeps/sounds a horn – what you might call an impatient motor vehicle driver).
Defn: What a doctor, who will most probably be on call, accompanies/is carried by him/her.
24 Scrap – can it still be recycled with reduced temperature? (9)
SCINTILLA : Anagram of(… be recycled) “can it still” minus(with reduced) “t”(symbol for “temperature” in physics).
26 March on, principally occupying 19 maybe in revolution (5)
TROOP : 1st letter of(…, principally) “on” contained in(occupying) reversal of(… in revolution) PORT(an example of which/maybe is the solution to 19 across).
28 More than one light punches (5)
LAMPS : Double defn: 2nd: Hits someone.
29 Bacon perhaps has insects cooked with it (9)
SCIENTIST : Anagram of(… cooked …) [ INSECTS plus(with) IT ].
Defn: An example of which/perhaps, is Francis Bacon.
Down
1 Drink – plastic bottles? (4)
ASTI : Hidden in(… bottles) “plastic”.
Defn: …, specifically a sparkling white wine.
2 Send out old lover half-heartedly, unfortunate start of tiff (6)
EXPORT : EX(term for one’s old/former lover) + 1 of 2 middle letters deleted from(half-heartedly) “poor”(unfortunate/pitiful) + 1st letter of(start of) “tiff”.
3 Train sentry to work, sacking one-time bully (10)
TYRANNISER : Anagram of(… to work) “Train sentry” minus(sacking) a/one “t”(abbrev. for “time”).
4 Group entertainment where the French replaces us (6)
CIRCLE : “circus”(entertainment provided by a travelling group of acrobats, clowns, and others) with LE(French for the article “the”) replacing(replaces) “us”.
5 Hand over – criminal pocketed present once more (8)
RECONFER : REFER(to hand over/to send someone to a medical specialist, say) containing(…pocketed) CON(short for “convict”, a criminal).
Defn: …/to award to someone again.
6 Coaches without starting exercises (4)
USES : “buses”(coaches) minus its 1st letter(without starting).
7 Islander is against bird-droppings being cleared at last (8)
ANTIGUAN : ANTI(against/opposed to) + “guano”(bird-droppings/excrement of seabirds) minus its last letter(being cleared at last).
Defn: A native of the island of Antigua in the Caribbean.
8 Bachelor place unfinished and vile (4)
BASE : BA(abbrev. for “Bachelor”) + “set”(to place/to position) minus its last letter(unfinished).
13 Fabric searched after turning over (5)
DENIM : Reversal of(… after turning over, in a down clue) MINED(searched/looked through a source of information, such as a database).
Not just jeans:
15 Departing minister – again one no good following (10)
RETREATING : RE-TREAT(to minister/attend to again) plus(… following) [ I(Roman numeral for “one”) + N(abbrev. for “no”) + G(abbrev. for “good”) ].
16 Maiden more disinterested, beginning to leave (5)
AIRER : [“fair”(disinterested/without taking sides) “er”(suffix denoting “more”, comparatively)] minus its 1st letter(beginning to leave).
Defn: A clothes horse for drying wet clothes/a clothes maiden, or a maiden in dialect.
A … and a …:
18 Tennis player’s wish with high aims (8)
WILLIAMS : WILL(wish/to express a desire) plus(wish) anagram of(high) AIMS.
Answer: …, Serena or Venus.
19 Record keeper, an important boxer of note (8)
ANNALIST : [ AN + A-LIST(describing the most celebrated/important individuals) ] containing(boxer of) N(abbrev. for “note”).
22 Cabaret actress upset after brother’s a nut (6)
BRAZIL : Reversal of(… upset, in a down clue) LIZA(Minnelli, leading actress in the musical film, Cabaret) placed below(after, in a down clue) BR(abbrev. for “brother”).
23 Cheers for plonk! (6)
PROSIT : PRO(for/in favour of, in contrast to “con”) + SIT(to sit down heavily/to plonk down).
Defn: Like …! an expression used to toast to one’s health.
24 Trading insults finally before beer (4)
SALE : Last letter of(… finally) “insults” placed above(before, in a down clue) ALE(a type of beer).
25 Check website regularly after start of tennis (4)
TEST : 2nd, 4th and 6th letters of(… regularly) “website” placed below(after, in a down clue) 1st letter of(start of) “tennis”.
27 Way to knock up hard (4)
PATH : Reversal of(… up, in a down clue) TAP(to knock/strike with a light blow or blows) + H(abbrev. for “hard”).
The somewhat sad theme became apparent when I solved SENNA Aand the noticed the combined AYRTON below. It definitely helped me with MCLAREN and IMOLA. AIRER was a nho but a nice misdirection from the usual cricket reference. I liked BLEEPER, SCINTILLA, SCIENTIST and PROSIT.
Ta Kite & scchua.
Very difficult.
I wasn’t sure how to parse 20ac ant = TONE; 19d.
Favourite: BRAZIL.
New for me: AIRER = maiden – clothes maiden Northern England dialect a frame on which clothes are hung to dry; clothes horse.
Other themers are FORMULA (T)ONE(R) and BRAZIL and maybe others.
Yes, AlanC @3. Had he lived, today, March 21st, SENNA would have been SIXTY-FIVE. And notice Alain PROS(i)T lurking there.
At 20a, TONE and Ant are equally familiar abbreviations of Anthony.
WILLIAMS also fits the theme
Ta Balfour and Niltac, I did think SIXTY-FIVE was a bit random.
Didn’t parse the TONE bit of TONER. Thanks Balfour@4 for providing the correct parse.
Liked FORMULA, WILLIAMS and ANNALIST among others.
Thanks Kite and scchua.
Very nice to get an ‘aha’ moment from googling Senna’s birthday in the early hours, but I did then go on to wake my daughter up at 2am hammering in nails to hang up her birthday bunting, not exactly top parenting 😬. Lovely respectful crossword, top marks for Editor for sorting the timing too, thank you K&scc
Mostly gentle for a Friday (more often than not I need to come back on Saturday to complete the end-of-week) puzzle, but I was still defeated by Prosit, a new way for me to say cheers! I blithely put in “pistols” for sexy Malcolm clan, not from any proper parsing but just so as not to have an entirely blank first run. With some crossers I was pleased to see that I was in the right ball park. I liked that one, FORMULA (with ‘rum’ as part of the anagram for a change rather than being the anagrind), IMOLA, NEWTS, ANTIGUAN, SCIENTISTS, SALE and more for some very neat surfaces. Also couldn’t parse TONER; very happy to give it a tick now that Balfour@4 has explained all. I never look for themes, but after finishing wondered if there was any Mother’s Day connection to be found and only then noticed the Formula One answers (AYR-TONer, SENNA, IMOLA, FORMULA, MCLAREN and no doubt more). But had no idea of the significance of the date. Many thanks scchua and Kite and happy Mother’s Day to all.
Another who couldn’t see why ant=TONE. I could see various answers related to FORMULA ONE racing, but have never followed it closely enough to see the specific AYRTON SENNA theme. Even with the theme, I failed to get MCLAREN.
I was just in the middle of typing that I couldn’t see why RECONFER was to present again, when I remembered confer=present an honour or medal. As for the maiden, I learned that meaning from crosswords (it was a clothes horse in our house) and actually managed to remember it today.
Thanks Kite and scchua – worth waiting for.
Saw SENNA, MCLAREN, BRAZIL, FORMULA, WILLIAMS and IMOLA and spotted the theme. Missed AYRTON split in the grid.
I thought SIXTY-FIVE was a bit random so I Googled if it had any significance to the great racer and it turns out it is the number of pole positions he held during his career. I bet I missed others as well.
A rare Kite solve as well, a setter I usually have difficulty with.
Liked SENNA, MCLAREN and ASTI for its simplicity.
Thanks Kite and Scchua (or should that be scchuamacer given the theme?). Enjoyed the pictures as well. My wife still has a pager in her hospital. I enjoyed the photos.
I have just seen above that SENNA would have been 65 today. That makes more sense than what I said.
Also I parsed TONE as Ant=Anthony=Tony=Tone but I imagine there’s a better explanation.
Malcom MCLAREN used to run a shop called “Sex” on the Kings Road with Vivienne Westwood. Hence sexy Malcolm?
Ticks for MCLAREN, SENNA and ANNALIST for the ALI / boxer misdirection
I wonder what percentage of setters ever actually drink ASTI
Total theme bypass. Obviously
Cheers K&S
Vivien Westwood and Malcolm MCLAREN also ran a boutique on the Kings Road called Sex. (I only know because I worked with someone who was one of their designers later on.)
Thank you to Kite and scchua
Well, I found this a tough struggle, with unfathomable parsings in several cases – for all of these, SIXTY FIVE, MCLAREN, ANNALIST, RETREATING and RECONFER. The Ayrton Senna theme completely washed over me, so I can’t say I got the full value out of this Friday offering. But did like the BLEEPER – are they still called that? Last one in AIRER, never heard it referred to as a Maiden before.
But many thanks Kite and Scchua for the entertainment and illustration…
Thanks to sschua for sorting out a couple parsings and definitions that eluded me. For ANNALIST, I was stuck on “boxer” being ALI, as it usually is, but couldn’t figure out a way to get the rest of the word. Oops.
I had no hope of spotting the theme, as motor racing interests me less than just about any other sport you can name. And specifically F1 never caught on here anyway–they’ve made several attempts, but NASCAR and IndyCar are too well entrenched–so I wouldn’t even have absorbed any details by cultural osmosis.
Couple of weak surfaces today in an otherwise great puzzle. “More than one light punches” is grammatically incorrect, since “more than one” takes a singular noun: “more than one hat”, for example. (If “punches” is a verb the surface makes no sense.) I’d be inclined to go with “Multiple light punches” because it’s more important to have the surface grammar right than the fodder grammar.
There’s a similar problem with “Group entertainment where the French replaces us” where a natural reading requires the plural verb “replace”. If you dislike this, the clue could be changed to “…with the French replacing us.”
Never heard of Ant as an abbreviation for Anthony, not could I understand where MCLAREN came from. I (very) dimly recall ‘maiden’ meaning a clothes-horse, but not in time to parse the answer.
Though not a brrrm brrms fan, am familiar with Senna as his death was headline news. Not enough, 3 decades later, to flag the theme. Instead, looked up 21 March 1965 and found it was the day Dr King and several thousand ser out from Selma on the voting rights march. Hey ho, life’s a tapestry. Thanks both.
Prosit a nod to Alain Prost?
[Me @16: to be clear, I do follow sports, just not that one! The order of my preferences has shifted over the years, but I’ve managed to get into baseball, American football, tennis, ice hockey, college basketball (first day of the NCAAs, practically a state holiday in Indiana where I grew up, was yesterday), association football, cricket for a hot second about 15 years ago, and anything Olympics. And I’ll watch any sport once; sometimes once is enough. But I grew up within an hour’s drive of one of the world’s most famous motor races and never saw fit to attend.]
[mrpenney @16. I share your lack of interest in motor sport. I recall many years ago reading a piece in the G by Benny Green, in which he wrote that his father, if I am remembering this accurately, had declared that if it involved petrol or music it was not a sport, a rule-of-thumb that I have always found applicable. However, on May 1st 1994 my partner’s brother was with us for lunch which, it being a beautiful day, we were eating outside on the patio. He was very much a Formula 1 enthusiast, so throughout the afternoon the TV was playing in the dining room, so that he could occasionally catch what was going on in IMOLA. I happened to .be there with him at the very moment when the awful SENNA crash occurred, and for that reason it has ever since been lodged in my consciousness.]
Oh, on PROSIT, here’s your earworm for the day.
Further to Adrian@17’s comment: yes, I too stumbled over those grammatical glitches. And in the SCINTILLA clue, there is a similar problem with the anagrind “be recycled” where the “be” is included to force a grammatical surface but unfortunately results in a mangled instruction to re-order the letters of “can it still”.
ArkLark @20. You will find that Balfour proposed this @4. It would be nice if people checked earlier contributions before putting in their twopennyworth. Sigh.
[poc @18 – maybe you are not resident in these parts, but the pairing of ANT(hony) McPartlin and DEC(lan) Donnelly have for years blighted our TV screens and tabloid newspapers and are very famous. Unavoidably so, I’m afraid.]
‘Cobbler’ my cryptic puzzle mentor and I thoroughly enjoyed the witty clever surfaces and innovative construction, plus cheeky word play.
PROSIT was a new word for us.
Favourites: ANTIGUAN, ASTI, AIRER, SENNA.
Thanks to scchua and Kite and Happy ‘Laetare Sunday’ to all.
My German’s a bit rusty, but if I remember right, “PROSIT” is often pronounced “Pros’t”. I’m still hoping someone will parse “ANT”=”TONE” more convincingly – we have a friend who’s often referred to as “TONE”, but he was Christened Tony (no Ant-).
I caught the theme for once, but it wasn’t as much of a help as I’d hoped for.
TTS&B
I once knew an Anthony who went by To (pronounced toe), which should have helped parsing TONER, but it didn’t (till I came here).
Many thanks to scchua for a superb pictorial blog, and to all the commenters.
I realised that the theme would not be to everyone’s tastes but I don’t think it was needed to solve the crossword. Thanks for the hints about grammar, which I will take on board for the future. Yes, the ‘sexy’ MCLAREN was a reference to both the shop called Sex and the management of the Sex Pistols.
I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzle. I missed the theme, but I found it more than doable without recognising it. I particularly liked DENIM. TONE seemed fine as ANT to me, but perhaps a little bit of a hack. Thanks Kite and Schaa
Adrian@17 I don’t see what the problem is with LAMPS. Simple DD. More than one light = ‘lights’, a synonym of lamps. Punches is also a synonym of lamps, at least it is around here. To lamp someone is to punch them. And on your other point, yes, ‘the French’ would require ‘replace’, but it’s a crossword clue and ‘the French’ actually, as you know, alludes to ‘the’ translated to French, which is singular, and therefore replaces is correct.
Here in the US, the electronic pager carried by a doctor is called a “beeper”, which left me thinking the definition in 22ac was something like “a motorist who swears a lot, and so has to be bleeped”. 🙂
[EleanorK @31, if I may say so without condescension, bright comments such as yours, and others from your noble Country, restore my faith in its future. Thank you]
16 reminded me of my Southern-born father, who during National Service in Warrington was taken aback on his first visit to his girlfriend’s home to hear his future father-in-law say “If we’d known you were coming, we’d have put the maiden in the shed.” Not much point in asking for her hand then, he thought (but luckily didn’t heed).
Another who had never heard of a clothes maiden. And as usual the theme went entirely over my head.
Our son named Antony uses ‘Ant’ as his moniker so that was clear enough for me – however, I’m not convinced that going :
TONE derives from ANTONY which can also give ANT is valid. I would not use ‘bus’ to clue ‘truck’ although they both descend from ‘vehicle’.
(btw, our Ant detests ‘Tony’. I don’t think anyone has dared to ry ‘Tone’ on him)
I liked FORMULA, SCINTILLA, DENIM, MCLAREN and SCIENTIST. I didn’t spot the theme but it’s not a sport I follow. I’d not heard of MAIDEN, it was a horse in our house. Thank you to scchua and Kite. Enjoy the weekend everyone.
Going back a long way, I know, but, in “Abigail’s Party”, Beverley calls Tony “Tone”.
I’ve seldom, if ever, seen so few comments on a midweek cryptic in the G. Does anyone have an idea as to why that might be?
Balfour@39. The blog was a bit late today, so our usual antipodean solvers, plus those who do the crossword over a morning cup of coffee, are all missing.
I’d the same thought Balfour. There was an earlier post from someone (Colorado maybe @7 at the time), who was surprised he was the first entry and that no one had mentioned the theme, which we obviously had. It then mysteriously disappeared, so I wonder if other posts have failed to register as well?
[AlanC @41: Yeah, that was me. I’m usually asleep at 11:30 UTC, but had insomnia so thought I’d check out 225. Lo and behold, no posts — finally a chance to scoop everybody! — only to find that I’d crossed with a brace of theme-spotters. And so, post withdrawn, back to bed 😄]
I’m not a fan of Tony or Tone, but I’m fine with Ant. How do I create an avatar anyway?
Late to the party now (cf sheffield hatter@40 for the reason why) but just wanted to thank Kite for a worthwhile puzzle and scchua for a helpful and colourful blog. Worth coming here today as I’d missed the theme, so the blog made for a good read. Despite not twigging to the theme I really liked 9a SIXTY-FIVE and 10a SENNA, as well as 13a DETENTE and 23d PROSIT (the latter already much-mentioned by others).
[Coloradan @42: 😀]
It reminds of of the old joke, name three formula one racing drivers named after Scottish towns. Stirling Moss, Lewis Hamilton and Ayr town centre.
Tough. Only completed half
Maybe the clue for 20a TONER is a misprint — Instead of “Ant”, try “Tan right to get cosmetic preparation” gives T-an = T-ONE + R. Gives a better surface, too!
PROSIT was funny