Not particularly hard for an Azed — but this was really a solve-by-committee (of work colleagues — thanks Martin and Frank!) so hard to gauge really. Some very nice surfaces (I liked the googly clue for obvious reasons).
| Across | ||
| 1 | ESPAGNOLETTE | Ce qui ferme la porte-fenêtre (‘lets gate open’, freely translated)? (12) |
| (lets gate open)* – “the fastening of a French window” — so very clever anagram! | ||
| 10 | COUP | What may go off with a bang? Let off pair (4) |
| COUP[let] | ||
| 11 | OOGONIAL | Ducks waddling along I brought in for egg-laying (8) |
| O,O=ducks (derived from no score in cricket),(along I)* | ||
| 12 | AUROUS | Most get excited about centre of heuch containing gold of a kind (6) |
| A([he[U[ch])ROUS[e[] – adjective for a univalent gold | ||
| 13 | OUTGUN | Defeat in western showdown, gut splattered in core of wound? (6) |
| [w]OU(TGU*)N[d] | ||
| 15 | SLEPT | Clan round loch was inactive (5) |
| S(L)EPT – where sept=clan. | ||
| 16 | TOSE | By the sound of it flaxen strand’s requiring comb (4) |
| TOSE sounds like “tow’s” where tow=flaxen strand. | ||
| 18 | AIRIER | Increasingly offhand I aroused ire breaking army regulation (6) |
| (I, ire*) in AR=abbrev(army regulation) | ||
| 19 | MATISSE | Artist: with me around one sits fidgeting (7) |
| (a, sits*) in ME | ||
| 23 | PRYTHEE | Please toot when joining the last in queue (7) |
| PRY=toot,THE[queu]E | ||
| 25 | THREEP | Insist on tray with plate (starter only) (6) |
| THREE=tray,P[late] | ||
| 29 | TRIG | Advanced maths and stuff (4) |
| two meanings where the second is dialect “to stuff”. | ||
| 30 | GORAL | Grand test for sure-footed creature (5) |
| G,ORAL – a Himalayan goat (so doubtless sure-footed). | ||
| 31 | DOLINA | Protégé of Diaghilev, S., in The Rock Fissure (6) |
| DOLINA=a geological sink hole. Parsed as DOLIN,A ref. Anton Dolin the ballet dancer who was in fact a protege of Diaghilev. Very clever clue and the last to be understood. Pretty sure Dolin was a nom de guerre since he was born Sydney Francis Patrick Chippendall Healey-Kay. | ||
| 32 | LOCATE | Clote, a wild plant (6) |
| (Clote, a)* | ||
| 33 | CHINAMAN | Bosie, mate to lament with Oscar put away? (8) |
| CHINA=(cockney) mate, M[o]AN=lament. Clever clue since bosie which is a type of googly (cricket ball swerve) was also Lord Alfred Douglas’s nickname who was Oscar Wilde’s friend. Oh and a chinaman is also a googly, I mean a bosie, I mean a spin thingy. | ||
| 34 | TIER | Row of guns, one responsible for hitch? (4) |
| Two meanings. | ||
| 35 | TANGLENETTER | Fishing vessel, rash with fish number taken on board (12) |
| T(ANGLE,N)ETTER – where tetter=eczema which is a kind of rash of course. | ||
| Down | ||
| 2 | SOULDAN | Old Egyptian ruler having power, and unbalanced (7) |
| SOUL=power,and and* and definition is an archaic (“old”) Egyptian sultan. Note that “having” doesn’t indicate containment here, it’s just the link word between the definition and wordplay. | ||
| 3 | PUREX | Process for extracting plutonium or uranium limited by president (5) |
| P(U)REX – incidentally also a process for extracting uranium and prex=slangy president (in the US). | ||
| 4 | GOUTY | Working out you’ll restrict having painful joints like this (5) |
| hidden in “working out you’ll” | ||
| 5 | NOSTOS | Drunkard offspring turning up in something like the Odyssey (6) |
| poem describing a return journey – rev(sot=drunkard, son=offspring) | ||
| 6 | LOUSILY | What’s extremely white enveloping old American in inferior fashion (7) |
| L(O,US)ILY | ||
| 7 | ENTERATE | Eastern Trent and ea merged with a particular canal (8) |
| E,(Trent, ea)* – alimentary canal. | ||
| 8 | TIGRISH | Rights infringed I’ll get stuck in, acting fiercely (7) |
| I in rights* | ||
| 9 | TAUPE | Mousey, cross before gym (5) |
| TAU=cross,PE=gym. | ||
| 10 | CASEMATED | Having strong compartment on board, packed with tea inside (9) |
| CASE(MATE)D – “an armoured compartment in a ship” and MATE=tea of the S. Am. variety. | ||
| 14 | NORSELLER | One supplying fishing line (and not one trading) (9) |
| NOR=and not,SELLER=one trading. A norsel is a fishing line. | ||
| 17 | RIVETING | Fascinating coterie – I check out joining in (8) |
| R(I,VET)ING | ||
| 20 | TORULIN | Against judge’s decision cut short vitamin (7) |
| TO,RULIN[g] – vitamin found in yeast. | ||
| 21 | STERNAL | Bony having nap interrupted by our boys in blue (7) |
| STE(RN)AL – nap=STEAL, RN=Royal Navy=our boys in blue. | ||
| 22 | LEGATEE | Heir apparent’s first with support on both sides (7) |
| LEG,A,TEE – first=A with two different kinds of support (LEG and TEE). | ||
| 24 | RAGLAN | Bit of cloth, woolly, not tucked into overcoat (6) |
| RAG=bit of cloth,LAN[ate=tucked into]=woolly. A kind of overcoat. | ||
| 26 | HOO-HA | Racket thug controlled, twice likewise curtailed (5) |
| HOO[d] HA[d] – “thug controlled” – we remove the trailing D similarly from both words. | ||
| 27 | AGONE | Since old, advanced in senility (5) |
| AG(ON)E – archaic “since” (so “Since old”) – ON=advance (as in ‘getting on’) in [old] AGE=senility. | ||
| 28 | KRAIT | Deadly serpent – rule one: keep it in a tub (5) |
| K(R,A)IT – a deadly snake. KIT=tub (dialect). | ||
*anagram
I did find this more difficult than normal. I was out most of Sunday last week, so no chance to finish it on the Sunday, but it took several more days before I did complete it.
Could quite see how 10ac and 17dn work – simple now that you’ve explained it – and I didn’t know the toot/pry meaning in 23ac.
33ac, CHINAMAN. I don’t know if there is much point in saying this, since the Azed blog, one week on, does not often attract many responses – only one so far this time – but here goes:
(1) A chinaman is NOT a googly, but the left-hand wrist-spin bowler’s equivalent of the right-hander’s leg-break, i.e. it spins IN to the right-hand batsman. Most wrist-spin bowlers have the deceptive magic of the googly, the ball that, by a subtle extra twist of the wrist, spins the other way. They are respectively ‘leg-break and googly’ and ‘chinaman and googly’ bowlers. (Just to confuse the issue, there are some contrarians who maintain that the chinaman IS the googly, but they are in a discredited minority – and we NEED the long-established term for the non-googly).
(2) despite this need, our very own Guardian has recently lent support to the move to ban the term as racist:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/mar/28/the-spin-cricket-chinaman-phrase
footnote: as Chambers indicates, the Australian use of the term ‘bosie’ interchangeably with googly dates back to the (right-handed) Englishman who first used it effectively, on the Ashes-recovering Test tour of 1903-04, B.J.T.Bosanquet – father of newsreader Reginald, but I don’t think that particular skill was passed on from father to son.
Neat clue anyway, great surface, as ilancaron notes – thanks to both.
thanks for the correct chinaman definition! I indeed stand corrected. Personally, I liked the clue since I work for Google…
It was really Azed who should stand corrected! – equating bosie with chinaman. But Chambers is misleading as well, under the headword ‘china’, reflecting the fact that there continue to be debates about the correct definition: this one could run and run, as it has been doing for decades. Chambers also incidentally labels the term Chinaman, for Chinese person, as derog[atory], in line with Andy Bull’s Guardian article.
Was Google named with cricket in the back, or front, of someone’s mind?
I think (the possibly apocryphal story goes) that it’s a misspelling of googol=10^100 intended to indicate a vast amount of information.