28 comments on “Inquisitor 1539: Noble Aims by Nimrod”

1. SPUR, as you’ve actually already worked out yourself, having identified the R as the extra letter in 21A.

   On balance, I’ve got to agree with you about the overall opinion of the crossword, but there’s always satisfaction in finishing a Nimrod and there was plenty of challenge here and the odd moment of his trademark misdirection in clues to enjoy. I did know Flashheart, though hadn’t realised it was the Red Baron Ade Edmondson was playing in that episode. Glad to see though that I wasn’t alone in knowing Snoopy instantly but having to turn to Wikipedia for the other three!

   I’m assuming the overall shape of the shaded picture represents an anti-aircraft gun, which would explain the slightly odd variety of ways the names were arranged in the grid and also adds to the respect I have for the construction of the grid.

   Thanks to Nimrod for keeping me busy on and off for much of last week and to HG as ever, grumpy or not.

2. Doh! kenmac, not HG – sorry. (And 21D, not 21A.)

3. I filled in all the answers and spotted Snoopy and the Red Baron but the other stuff passed me by completely. Quite a long time on google would have been needed. Grrr!

4. We started this at home on Saturday and really struggled to make any headway. Thankfully the next day we had plenty of spare time as we were on tbe train to London.

   Once we had filled the grid we were on the look out for SNOOPY. It took a while before we realised that we had ARCH instead of ARCO. We couldn’t parse it but thought that BOW could be the definition.

   Thankfully we had wi-fi on the train and we were able to trawl through various wiki pages and various academic papers concerning who killed the Red Baron.

   Once we had identified the characters to be highlighted we realised we were short of shaded cells. Once we saw someone’s first name the penny dropped!

   We are not sure how much ‘fun’ we had during the solve but there was a real sense if achievement in completing it. The grid construction was impressive as expected. Including full names was an amazing feat.

   Thanks Nimrod for the challenge – more brain cells stimulated to keep going. Thanks kenmac for the blog.

5. I filled the grid and got all the characters, and the quote via Wikipedia as well. I never did resolve the cryptic clue, and so felt that I’d really cheated my way to a result, but never mind. Thought this was an enjoyable puzzle anyway, and liked the way all the characters were positioned in the grid reflecting the manner of the baron’s demise.

6. Internet searching and grid staring took me much longer than solving the clues. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find David Blake and Robert Buie, both mentioned in the Wiki article as claiming to have brought down the Red Baron. Eventually I saw Flashheart and remembered the Blackadder episode, so realised we weren’t necessarily looking for real people. Snoopy went in last; I know little about him and only found out about his connection with TRB through yet more searching.

   As Bert and Joyce say, there was a real sense of achievement in completing this one.

   Could someone please explain why the T is a crucial point in space and time? I can see that it’s the first letter of THE RED BARON so that’s where it all starts, but there must be more to it than that to justify such a grand description.

    

7. OPatrick @1 & @2:

   Thanks for that. I wavered between RING & DING for ages and finally settled on the latter but clearly forgot to change the wordplay entry. Fixed now.

   How ironic – happens to me all the time – you point out a simple mistake and end up making your own mistakes.

8. @6: I have added a new paragraph to my blog. I had it in mind to write but forgot about it in my rush to post yesterday evening.

9. So much to object to here! First the quotation is a clue to the extra letters, not the other way round. Second there are TWO squares where the same letter is unclued twice, not one as the rubric states –  the T already noted and the R of velouR and kindeR. Third the quotation (in all the versions that I found online) omitted the words “in order”. which made making sense of the quote and the unclued letters impossible. Fourth how does “NOT I” in 42A come to be clued by “unconscious” – simply wrong in my opinion. that is a start!

   I finished the crossword, spent (wasted) far too much time online finding the various protagonists, failed to parse BELLAMY or NOTICED and a number of others, and at the end felt thoroughly dissatisfied. Well done Kenmac for parsing everything and for the blog. Rather you than me! Not my favourite this year, Nimrod!!

    

10. A DNF from me – after some Wiki-oogling, I had THE RED BARON, ROY BROWN, WOP MAY and CEDRIC PIPKIN, but then searched in vain for other characters in the real-life events – SMOUT, BUIE, RIDGWAY. I even saw and discounted SNOOPY and FLASH HEART – doh!

    I took the (ignored) T as the point at which ROY BROWN engages the Baron, with WOP MAY observing from above. The Baron then descends close to ground level where Pipkin gets in the fatal shot from the ground and the Baron comes to a sorry end with …RON as the other ignored letters.

    All that drama in 169 cells!…

11. I nearly didn’t start this one when I saw who the setter was but then surprised myself by completing the grid relatively quickly. However, I was confused (still am) by there being two examples of crossing answers ignoring the same letter (VELOUR and KINDER as well as CATSPAW and FOURTH) and could not make anything of the extra letters. I didn’t spot The Red Baron and even if I had I wouldn’t have made the Snoopy connection as it’s not a cartoon strip I’m familiar with. As Nimrod was the setter I decided not to invest any more time in it and, given the excellent blog by Kenmac, am glad I didn’t. By the way Kenmac, as you haven’t seen any episodes of Blackadder, can I recommend that you watch at least the last series “Blackadder Goes Forth” when the opportunity arises?

    Thanks to Nimrod for the challenge which left me defeated again and to Kenmac for the blog.

     

12. Thanks for the blog,a feat in itself. I think Rick played Flashheart but I was struggling to fill the grid even with a partner (who saw The Red Baron)

    I also had ARCH instead of ARCO-thanks for parsings which i didnt get.

    Thought this was tough even by Nimrod standards.But isnt that what the Inquy is for. So glad theres a blog on it.

    Advice to kenmac-treat yourself to some Blackadders!

13. I really enjoyed this and was surprised to read so many negative comments.  I got everything except SNOOPY and FLASHHEART as I was fixated on finding a place in the grid for Robert Buie and Snowy Evans.  I was familiar with both Snoopy and Blackadder so no excuse there.

    Thanks Nimrod for a super puzzle and thanks to kenmac for the blog.

14. PS – I forgot to mention how much I liked the grid with Cedric Popkin on the ground, the aspirants wheeling above and The Red Baron descending to his final landing in the corner of the grid.

15. Sympathy for Hihoba @9. For those of us who found that the checked R in KINDER & VELOUR was unclued and assumed that it was the cell where this happened so must “represent a crucial point in time and space” probably had a harder time than those who first found the intended cell with the checked T of CAT’S PAW & FOURTH – the other of the two cells where this happened.
    And I agree that it would be difficult to use the extra letters to find the quotation.
    Didn’t manage to resolve NOTICED, & BELLAMY took a while.
    Last, despite having seen (& enjoyed) much of Blackadder, I had no recollection of the name Flashheart and gave up searching for the final 9 cells to highlight.

    OPatrick @1: did you see Ifor‘s response to our little interchange last week?  Yours, H(is)G(rumpiness).

    PS Not my favourite puzzle either, but thanks for the blog. (Still don’t understand “crucial point in time and space”.)

16. I always like an Inquisitor better if I can finish it, and eventually I did — though it took forever to spot Flashheart despite having watched Blackadder Goes Forth including the scene where F shoots the Red Baron (though not in the air). No complaints, and I admired the grid layout hugely. The Curtly -> Ambrose construction utterly defeated this cricket ignoramus. Clearly it had to be BROSE, but I remained baffled until today.

17. I hadn’t realised how neat the placement of the ‘crucial’ (cross-shaped) T was – when I first guessed at the RED BARON I’d checked the date of his demise, thinking it would be the FOURTH of the month, but then forgot about that. Another little impressive twist, to have 21(A) in the Fourth month incorporated.

    Am I alone in seeing an anti-aircraft gun in the shaded figure?

    (HG, yes, and I panicked for a moment there thinking I’d made another horrible grammatical faux-pas with imply and infer, or similar. But I don’t think I have, have I?)

18. OPatrick @17: no, there was no faux pas on your part – I think it’s just a list of solecisms that get up the nose of some people, to which one might (but won’t) add “less”/”fewer”, “straw man”, “curate’s egg” (the meaning of the last of which has now definitely supplanted the original).

    Hadn’t noticed the hundredth anniversary of the incident – so thanks.

19. Kenmac – you and I have very different tastes. It would be the last day on earth before I described Peanuts as “excellent”, and I’m amazed that you’ve never seen Blackadder. As for the puzzle, well, least said soonest mended…

20. I would however endorse H of Hihoba’s observation that the quotation is the clue, not the extra letters. I would be flabbergasted if anyone ‘solved’ the extra letters clue withiut already knowing or having fround the quotation.

21. Thanks to Nimrod for the puzzle – like others, I was initially expecting something very difficult but actually found the solve to be not too daunting after all (the endgame was another story). Apologies if this has been explained above and I have missed it, but what was being referred to with this part of the preamble: “The four remaining clues similarly ignore one letter, together identifying an end point”? Is this a 4-letter word?

    The design of the grid to look like a gun hadn’t occurred to me and makes the construction particularly impressive.

22. Kippax, the ‘four clues that ignore one letter’ are down in the South East corner and the omitted letters are the R, O and N of Baron, which is the ‘end’ of the Red Baron, also visually representing his crash landing, I think. (Not sure that I understand the concerns about this e.g. from Hi above – the rubric states that the clues are similar to the first two, in that they omit one letter, and that together these identify the end point. That seems fine to me – there’s nothing suggesting two clues can’t be identifying the same missing letter.)

23. One thing I did mean to ask about – can anyone explain the choice of ‘aspirant’ to refer to the Red Baron in the rubric? I initially interpreted this as meaning the quote would be from one of those claiming credit for killing him, so it took me a while to find the quote as I thought it would be about the Red Baron rather than from him (and bingybing, although I didn’t exactly work out the quote by solving the ‘clue’, I did identify egg and cheese from it and then search for this, with the Red Baron, to find the quote). As it’s Nimrod, I’ve little doubt there will be about three layers of meaning to this choice of wording.

24. Opatrick@23 – Chambers gives aspire(2) as ‘to aim at … high things’ (my ellipsis). I guess they all did that.

25. OPatrick @23 – I took aspirant to mean someone who flies high, from aspire meaning to rise high, to tower over something.  I don’t know if this is right or not.

26. I had a complete and correct grid and all six individual highlighted, but I had 18 (yes, eighteen) of the extra letters either incorrect or still blank. Hence I didn’t find the quotation. I had E_AM and F_TA but couldn’t see the connection.

27. I was shocked, shocked that the official published solution in Saturday’s i cited Blackadder II (the Elizabethan-era series) rather than Blackadder Goes Fourth for the Flashheart/Red Baron connection/

28. I meant to add in my earlier comment that I love the wordplay for 44a! I didn’t understand it at the time, so thanks for the explanation here.

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