We see that this is Samson’s ninth Listener crossword and the second time he has set a circular one.
Four unclued rings in seven, one of them in a foreign language and the radial clues all to be entered jumbled (that’s the word the Numpty of the Dash team really dislikes in a preamble) with an extra letter in each of them that is not entered in the grid. “Are Listener crosswords more difficult this year or are we just becoming senile and losing our solving ability?” an old solving friend asked me.
In fact, thankfully, those seven clues for the three rings were generous: who could complain about ‘Build and demolish we hear (5)’ (RAISE “RAZE” heard), or ‘Bankrupt’s not very rude (8)’ (INSOLVENT less V) or even the hidden old relative ‘held by China unthinkable’ (NAUNT, of course). So we soon had the rings completed and had to work our way through the radials. The first ten were similarly generous clues with ‘Drain ale lost by the kidneys’ (ADRENAL*) maintaining Samson’s place in the Listener oenophiles – Cheers, Samson! Those extra letters gave a fine hint too: WALTZ KING – so we were celebrating the Johann Strauss bicentenary (as, of course, we were told on the radio this week).
There were some challenges to follow: FIDEIST, DIONAEA, NOSODES, WILTJAS, LAUWINE, MANIPLE and clues like ‘Old dress up after what some call “cod” meal.’ (Hmmm, our usual whinge about an implausible surface reading!) We had to back-solve from MANTEAU to work out that we had a P from UP following MAN, a dialect COD, and the meal TEA. And we needed to find all of those words – not ones we’ll be using at the dinner table today – in order to produce the hints HEDONISM, DAILY PRESS and RIVER.
In case you were as flummoxed as we were, we parsed 17d ‘Di, on account of designation enters dangerous plants (7)’ for DIONAEA (Venus flytraps) + an extra M as DI + NA[M]E in O/A [with one of those tricky postpositioned indicators that we think spoil the crosswords syntax], and 22d ‘Predicts taking inverted still for grand film directors (7)’ f0r AUTEURS + an extra Y as AUGURS – G + [Y]ET<. One of us conefssed that, having spotted the theme and the central ring rather quickly, they did a lot of back-solving using a word-finder to check what 7-letter words would fit the radials which included the four known letters, justifying the choice afterwards, which definitely helped things along. But do you approve?
Wein Weib und Gesäng, Morgenblätter and An der schönen blauen Donau are all Viennese waltzes by Johann Strauß II so there we have it – how nicely topical. Thank you, Samson..
I wonder how many solvers will carelessly insert the familiar WINE WOMEN and SONG for WEIN, WEIB und GESANG, when AUTEURS (and the original German) requires us to make her a singular Weib, a woman! No problem, though, about what colour we had to make the Danube – although a careless DER for DIE was still there to trap us. (An der schönen blauen Donau uses the feminine dative which happens to be the same as the masculine nominative…)
Interesting ! Kenneth
75FLOKI