After blogging a difficult Paul puzzle on Thursday and battling with a fiendish one from Enigmatist on Friday, I was wondering what on earth was in store for us on Saturday. It turned out to be Vlad.
Oh dear: on the first run through, I entered no across answers at all. Fortunately, the anagrams at 2dn and 4dn gave me a bit of a start and I managed to fill in the top left corner and 25ac and then ran into the buffers.
With only an E and the final R entered for 5,16, the phrase A WORTHLESS PIECE OF PAPER inexplicably popped from nowhere into my head and I was amazed to see that it parsed – pure Serendipity. [At this point, I was wondering if this was an anniversary but it wasn’t.]
I was surprised to find I now had about half of the grid filled and things looked a lot healthier. I won’t say the rest exactly tumbled into place but they fell more readily than I had expected at first. The top right corner was the most stubborn – with a resounding penny-dropping moment when 10ac went in.
I stared hard for ages at 16dn but the parsing completely escaped me. I couldn’t fully work out 18ac, either. It was twenty four hours before I went back to them and, as happens so often, saw them straight away.
I really enjoyed this solve – just my kind of Prize puzzle. And then we had Vlad’s alter ego, Tyrus, in the Indy and Rosa Klebb in the FT. Well, they did call it Super Saturday. 😉
Many thanks to Vlad for an absorbing and satisfying challenge.
Across
1 Very keen to stay around conference venue (7)
POTSDAM
Reversal [around] of MAD [very keen] + STOP [stay]
5 Hacked Off, with film star involved (7)
ANGERED
[Richard] GERE] [film star] in AND [with]
9) Violently attacks stationer after a fracas (5,4)
TEARS INTO
Anagram [after a fracas] of STATIONER
10 What can be played by men on horseback (5)
ORGAN
OR [other ranks – men] + a reversal [back] of NAG [horse]
11 That bloke’s southern German (4)
HESS
HE’S [that bloke’s] + S [southern]
12 Spirit audience’s not picked up — it’s insubstantial (6,4)
SCOTCH MIST
SCOTCH [spirit] + MIST [sounds like ‘missed’ – ‘not picked up’ by audience]
14 One-time female’s a divine creature (6)
ATHENA
A [one] T [time] HEN [female] A
15 Support government resigning — claims they want out (7)
LEAVERS
LE[g] [support] minus g [government] + AVERS [claims] – yet another reference to the referendum
18 Comic routine about height in bad taste (6)
SHTICK
I was fixated on ‘height’ being H and couldn’t see how STICK meant ‘in bad taste’ – but, of course, it’s SICK [in bad taste, as in a sick joke] round HT [height]
20 Done with PM’s backing — Sun perhaps fails to respond to alarm (10)
OVERSLEEPS
OVER [done with] + a reversal [backing] of PEEL’S [PM’s + S [sun]
]
21 Put down before Indiana city (4)
LAIN
I’m afraid this clue doesn’t work, however much I want it to: LAIN can only be the past participle of LIE, which is intransitive, not ‘lay’, to put down, the past participle of which is ‘laid’
24 Jobs lost everywhere? Not entirely (5)
STEVE
Hidden in loST EVErywhere – reference to Steve Jobs, co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Apple
25 Awful from City playing b***** Real (9)
EXECRABLE
EX [from] + EC [City of London] + an anagram [playing] of B REAL
26 Attitudes accepted by detective in force (7)
MINDSET
IN [accepted] + DS [Detective Sergeant] in MET [Metropolitan Police Force]
27 Royal officer completely losing head over queens (7)
EQUERRY
[v]ERY [completely?] round QU ER [queens]
Down
1 Spurs No 2 has long throw (5)
PITCH
P [second letter – No 2 – of Spurs] + ITCH [long]
2 Start in winding passage (7)
TRANSIT
Anagram [winding] of START IN
3 Henry’s climbing down over style (4)
DASH
Reversal [climbing] of H [Henry – SI unit of inductance] + SAD [down] – I’m not sure what ‘over’ is doing
4 Genuine? Hmm! React to “settlement”(of 19 21) … (6,9)
MUNICH AGREEMENT
Anagram [settlement] of GENUINE HMM REACT – settlement is doing double duty
The Munich agreement was signed by [Neville] CHAMBER [19] LAIN [9]
5 … that’s in force? Please, it’s a whopper — scrap! (1,9,5,2,5)
A WORTHLESS PIECE OF PAPER
Anagram [scrap] of FORCE PLEASE IT’S A WHOPPER
Hurrah! – a meaningful ellipsis: these two clues are definitions of each other, with cleverly allusive surfaces
6 “Don’t stop upsetting party!” — PM receiving one side’s cheers (4,6)
GOOD HEALTH
GO [don’t stop] + a reversal [upsetting] of DO [party] + L [left – one side] in [Edward] HEATH [PM]
7 Musical genre infuriated man (7)
RAGTIME
TIM [man] in [a] RAGE – sorry, can’t resist offering you this earworm 😉
8 Shows up group (1D) (7)
DENOTES
Reversal [up] of SET [group] + ONE [1] D [down] – great misdirection
13 Jail those selling drugs to clerical people (3-7)
PEN PUSHERS
PEN [jail] + PUSHERS [those selling drugs]
16 Making love shortly after wrestling — animal! (7)
OPOSSUM
O [love] + POS[t] [after] + SUM[o] [wrestling] both minus their last letters [shortly]
17 Child‘s cut not real — point taken (7)
PRETEEN
PRETEN[d] [not real – cut] round E [east – point taken]
19 House cleaner receives award (7)
CHAMBER
MBE [award] in CHAR [cleaner]
22 Wanting help, joint letter said (5)
NEEDY
Sounds like [said] ‘knee’ [joint] + D [letter]
23n Married woman’s cheating husband finally kicked out (4)
FRAU
FRAU[d] [cheating] minus d [last letter of ‘husband’]
Thanks Eileen. I didn’t enjoy it as much as you. I got the answers within an hour or two but couldn’t explain several of them (you’ve done that) and was occasionally irritated, eg with the asterisks in 25A. But I did like STEVE.
Much to enjoy here, and a groan from me too for the parsing of OPOSSUM.
In 3d, Henry has ‘climbing,down’ over it…’Henry’s climbing down over’. Thanks Vlad and Eileen.
Thanks Eileen. This took me a long time and, like you,
I found the NE corner took the longest. I guess it might have helped if you were a Londoner, EC and MET both escaped me. I tried to read some significance into the asterisks, without success.
I liked this a lot, so thanks to Vlad and Eileen. Needed parsing for a few so appreciated the blog. I enjoyed the historical theme having taught a bit of Modern History in a past life.
BigglesA@3, were the asterisks in 25a meant to make up the rest of the great Australian adjective, bLOODY? That’s what I thought of, although I may be totally off the mark.
That’s what I thought too Julie but I tried to make something more of it – five stars or the like? Nothing worked though.
My dad thought that in 25a “from City” was EXEC, which I think I prefer.
Thanks Vlad and Eileen
Finished OK, but was unable to parse MINDSET (which I should have) and OPOSSUM – I thought SUMO might come into it, but didn’t see the rest. Yhe MUNICH AGREEMENT anagram was my way in, though SCOTCH MIST was FOI.
You’ve missed underlining “Comic routine” for SHTICK, Eileen.
26a Came up with MORESBY – MORES + BY, a fictional detective. It gave me the M for OPOSSUM. Sadly scuppered by the last T in 4d – but the M stayed put!
Thanks, muffin – amended.
Thank you Vlad and Eileen.
An enjoyable solve, but I stupidly got held up for a while at 13d, not having ATHENA or STEVE I could only think of LAY PASTORS, which would not parse of course. The asterisks in 25a did not bother me, I just made the same assumption as Julie @4.
SHTICK, a new word for me, and OPOSSUM were the last in.
I found this hard too and wasn’t helped by entering KITSCH instead of SHTICK
for 10dn-it seemed to be confirmed by CHAMBER! This,of course, made 5 dn
impossible- and then the penny dropped and I was away. LAIN(LOI) didn’t seem
right but had to be the answer the setter required. Pity, it marred an otherwise
inventive puzzle.
Quite a good workout though.
Thanks Vlad.
I was lucky enough to test solve this. Lots to love, as usual with this setter. I thought the difficulty level was spot on for a Prize puzzle. I particularly like the simple FRAU. I don’t see anything wrong with the asterisks in 25a.
Great blog and puzzle. Thanks to V&E.
Just to check on the theme: we start off in 1938 with CHAMBER/LAIN, MUNICH AGREEMENT and A WORTHLESS PIECE OF PAPER. Then we have HESS; and possibly SCOTCH MIST is a reference to his landing in Scotland in 1941? Then we move to 1945 and the POTSDAM conference. There are also hints of a Chamberlain or Munich connection in “Support government resigning” (15a), “Done with PM’s backing” (20a), and “PM receiving one side’s cheers” (6d).
Are there any more? Are EQUERRY and FRAU part of it?
I enjoyed this although I found it was all over a little too quickly.
I had a reasonable amount of entries after the first pass but not the important overlapping CHAMBER and LAIN! However these were soon solved which made MUNICH AGREEMENT and A WORTHLESS PIECE OF PAPER almost write ins.
There were then far too many crossers to significantly delay completion.
This was a very high class puzzle, yes not Vlad at full-strength difficulty but I don’t begrudge that.
Thanks to Vlad and Eileen
Thanks to Vlad and Eileen. This puzzle defeated me, so that over the course of the week I managed to complete about half – and some of those were guesses that turned out to be right. I much appreciated Eileen’s explanations.
This defeated me last Saturday, with only a few clues solved, and I wasn’t able to get back to it until today (or technically yesterday, as it is past midnight here now). This time I was able to complete it reasonably easily, thanks mainly to getting MUNIICH AGREEMENT (I already had POTSDAM from last weekend). However, although I got OPOSSUM from the definition and crossers, I couldn’t make any sense of the wordplay other than wondering if SUM(o) might be involved, so thanks for that explanation, Eileen. I also needed help with MINDSET. I’d got the elements (MET, IN and DS), but I took the “in” from the clue as giving the -IN- in the solution and “accepted” as the inclusion indicator. That gave the -DS- and -IN- in the wrong order and I couldn’t see why.
Although I found this puzzle frustrating initially, I did enjoy it this evening and I think it was well pitched for the Prize slot.
Thanks, Vlad and also Eileen.
21a, might this work…
for lay
“The baby was put down in her cot to sleep for the night”
“The baby was laid in her cot to sleep for the night”
for lie
“The helicopter had put down in the valley for the day out of view of the enemy”
“The helicopter had lain in the valley for the day out of view of the enemy”
someone can probably come up with something better.
Cookie @18
That’s a brilliant attempt to justify the definition in the clue: you can indeed replace put down by lain, and the sentence about the helicopter still makes perfect sense. However, the meanings are different: the second sentence tells what the helicopter was doing for the day, whereas the first tells also how it got there (‘put down’ being an economical way of saying ‘put itself down’).
It would be nice to rescue the clue, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
21 Put down before Indiana city (4)
The parsing is LA (city) IN (Indiana) ie before IN LA
Davy @20
Agreed – the parsing works ok. (I’m now used to setters saying ‘before B A’ instead of ‘A before B’.)
The difficulty with 21a is in making ‘put down’ mean LAIN. As Eileen said, ‘put down’ can mean ‘lay’ or ‘laid’, but it cannot mean ‘lain’ – unless you can think of a sentence where you can replace one past participle with the other and mean the same thing.
Thanks Alan @19, I thought my example was a bit iffy. Oh dear, I suppose the clue will have to be laid to rest.
Apologies for my silence re 21ac. I’ve been out for most of the day and I’m on borrowed computer access, while mine is in hospital!
I’m sorry but there is no rescue – as I said before, I really wish there were! [I’ve spent many hours struggling to teach the difference between ‘lie’ [intransitive] and ‘lay’ [transitive] to students whose first language isn’t English. Part of the problem is that the past tense of ‘lie’ is ‘lay’!]
Eileen @23
Quite. Bill Bryson, in his book Troublesome Words, has an entry for ‘lay, lie’ in which he says that these two words “are a constant source of errors. There are no simple rules for dealing with them.” (And he goes on to give examples of the use of each word in its different tenses.)
Worse than this, I was taught that a hen “layed” an egg, not having seen this word for years, I thought I had better check up on it while going into the lay/lie problem… I found that this usage is archaic – OK, NZ used to be 30 years behind the times when I was young, that’s 70 years ago now, which makes 100 years, but I cannot find the last reference in literature to the word…
Interesting further discussion, Solvers. Yes Cookie, the nuns in my little country school in Australia taught me that hens “layed” eggs, and I have never varied from that, even when it gets underlined as an error on my electronic device as just occurred. In the same way I still say that the person who was executed was “hanged” even though a student (aged 15) recently corrected me!
Yup, the clue for LAIN is indeed incorrect.
Thanks to Eileen for the blog and to other for their comments.
Sorry about ‘lain’.
Other = others.
Thanks Vlad and Eileen.
A tough solve. Completed the grid in the end but was not confident about LEAVERS, RAGTIME or OPOSSUM so really appreciate your parsing Eileen.
So that’s the week before last done and I can progress to last Monday!
Now trying to resuscitate 21a – The COED gives put 17 intr. (foll. by in, out of) US (of a river) flow in a specified direction.
Merriam-Webster, put, intransitive verb
2 of a ship : to take a specified course “put down the river”
Might this work
“The boat had put down on the fast current of the river for only a few hours when New York came into sight.”
“The boat had lain on the fast current of the river for only a few hours when New York came into sight.”
I think that boat has sailed…
Cookie @31
I think your latest sample sentences are too similar to the ones about the helicopter for this to count as a successful solution to the problem.
Gonzo thinks this boat has sailed, and I think he might be right. Vlad simply made an error (a very easy one to make, I might add).
Nice try, though.
Thanks Alan, and thanks again Tramp.
Sorry, thanks again Vlad, I missed the tramp streamer and am now stranded…
Thanks all
Are truncations becoming too common and too vague; eg pos= pos(t)=after.
RCWhiting @36
I don’t understand your objection: as I wrote in the blog, both POS[t] and SUM[o] lose their last letters [‘shortly’].
Thanks Vlad and Eileen
That was a hard week of puzzles and good to see a Prize puzzle with this level of difficulty. I was another who went for an early KITSCH that went unparsed, as did the correct SHTICK when it arrived some time later.
A lot of clever tricks used throughout – none that stopped the grid from being filled but a couple that were beyond me to fully work out (SHTICK and OPOSSUM) and some that I was pleased to wrinkle out (MINDSET and RAGTIME). All topped off by my last one in – STEVE.