I enjoyed this crossword from Eccles. He uses Occam’s razor in his clueing, which is often very straightforward (but nicely testing in places, as I found to my cost with 27ac).
Definitions underlined, in maroon. Anagram indicators in italics.
Perhaps someone will correct me, but my suspicion is that Eccles doesn’t do ninas. At any rate I see nothing.
| Across | ||
| 1 | SABBATH | Small group of Swedes getting Thursday as day of rest (7) |
| s Abba Th. | ||
| 5 | POWWOW | Meeting wartime captive? That’s amazing (6) |
| P.O.W. Wow! | ||
| 8 | RURAL | River joins another, far away from cities (5) |
| r Ural | ||
| 9 | CONTRACT | Agreement with Turkey’s law (8) |
| con Tr act | ||
| 11 | ARMADILLO | A right crazy sick old creature (9) |
| a r mad ill o | ||
| 12 | RUMBA | Strange Egyptian soul dance (5) |
| rum ba — in Egyptian mythology, ba is the soul, represented by a bird with a human head | ||
| 13 | NOTE | Returning foreign visitor working for me? (4) |
| (ET on)rev. — me as in doh re mi etc; me is an alternative for mi | ||
| 14 | COMMANDO | Army unit arriving half-cut at stag party? (8) |
| com{ing} man do, a fanciful term for a stag party, hence the question mark | ||
| 18 | MARMOSET | Stammer badly describing love for Primate (8) |
| (Stammer)* round 0 | ||
| 19 | AGAR | It cooks royal jelly (4) |
| Aga r [= royal] | ||
| 22 | EQUAL | Organise quality boxing match (5) |
| Hidden in OrganisE QUALity, the inclusion indicated by ‘boxing’ | ||
| 24 | SUBSCRIBE | Sign up Jules Verne? (9) |
| He was a sub-scribe, ie he wrote (in 20000 Leagues Under the Sea) about a submarine | ||
| 25 | IDEALISE | To glorify current understanding is ecstasy (8) |
| i deal is E | ||
| 26 | CREED | Doctrine of director associated with G Greene (5) |
| C. Reed — The director who was associated with Graham Greene was Carol Reed, most famously in ‘The Third Man’ | ||
| 27 | FREEZE | Stop releases by dictator (6) |
| “frees” — ‘by dictator’ indicates that it’s a homophone — this one defeated me, but now I see the answer it’s fairly obvious | ||
| 28 | TOASTER | Kitchen device rotates liquid (7) |
| (rotates)* | ||
| Down | ||
| 1 | SERIAL NUMBER | Identifying feature of anaesthetist? (6,6) |
| CD relying on the fact that a number is a numb-er, but what the ‘serial’ is doing I’m not sure. The usual looseness that is associated with a CD, I wouldn’t mind betting. [Serial as in ‘serial murderer’, so an anaesthetist, who has presumably many people to numb over the years, is a serial numb-er. Thanks to Dicho@2 for this.] | ||
| 2 | BAROMETER | One senses pressure to exchange Italian capital for roubles (9) |
| In the word ‘barter’ [= exchange] you remove the first r [= roubles] and replace it with Rome | ||
| 3 | ALLUDE | Refer everyone, vulgar Republican excepted (6) |
| all {R}ude | ||
| 4 | HECKLE | Goodness, the French interrupt rudely (6) |
| heck! le | ||
| 5 | PUNDONOR | Joke with philanthropist as matter of principle (8) |
| pun donor — I’d never heard this word but trusted to the wordplay and the checkers. Eccles kindly clues a rare word with easy wordplay, as Ximenes said you should all those years ago. Sure enough it’s there, and Collins says it’s in the lower 50% of commonly used words in the Collins Dictionary, though how they know that without reading everything that has ever been written, and monitoring all conversations etc, I can’t see. | ||
| 6 | WAR CRIME | Weimar Republic extremists involved in genocide, for example (3,5) |
| (Weimar R{epubli}c)* | ||
| 7 | OCCAM | Periodically, Joyce charms friar with razor (5) |
| {J}o{y}c{e} c{h}a{r}m{s} — I’d heard of Occam’s Razor but was a little vague about it | ||
| 10 | LABOUR LEADER | A durable role, possibly, for Corbyn? (6,6) |
| (A durable role)* | ||
| 15 | NEGLIGENT | Abandoning its responsibilities, National Trust is retailing skimpy night attire (9) |
| negligé NT — I can’t see what ‘retailing’ is doing: so far as I can see it is to do with selling and has no other meaning that can be relevant here, not at any rate that of supporting; so is it a misprint? Or am I missing something? [Yes I am: and I can’t spell the word negligée, which has to be retailed — actually no, it has to be re-tailed. Thanks again to Dicho@2 for this.] | ||
| 16 | COALFACE | Site using hard work to process coca leaf (8) |
| (coca leaf)* | ||
| 17 | PERSPIRE | Sweat as Neuschwanstein’s architect suggests how fee should be calculated (8) |
| Neuschwanstein’s architect might well have suggested that he (yes he was a man, Eduard Riedel) should be paid by the spire, because N. is full of spires | ||
| 20 | OBJECT | End protest (6) |
| 2 defs — ob-jict and ‘b-ject | ||
| 21 | ACACIA | American agents about to be hiding in tree? (6) |
| A (ca) CIA — ca is hiding in (A CIA) | ||
| 23 | UNDER | Completely submerged by European articles (5) |
| un der — ‘un’ is the French for ‘a’ and ‘der’ is the German for ‘the’ | ||
*anagram
Great puzzle. PERSPIRE and SUBSCRIBE are supreme examples of the type and there’s plenty more good stuff scattered throughout.
Thanks Eccles & John
Negligée (ending with two e’s) needs to be retailed.
Since an aesthetist presumably numbs patients on more than one occasion that makes her a serial number.
Ooops – meant to type ‘ an anaesthetist ‘.
Thanks Dicho for your two good points. Blog amended.
Quite challenging but none the less enjoyable. Had to rely solely on the wordplay to get OCCAM and similarly with PUNDONOR although that was more difficult as we could have been looking for the name of a specific philanthropist for the second part of the answer.
I now know the names of all three architects involved with the creation of Neuschwanstein when all I needed to do was to look at a picture of the place!
The clues that stood out for me, because I always go for the humorous ones, were POWWOW and SERIAL NUMBER.
Many thanks to Eccles and to John for the blog.
Annoyed to have missed the ‘dictator’ homophone indicator which, yes, is now all too obvious. I entered PUNDONOR in hope from the wordplay, not imagining such a word could exist. The “lower 50%” is a pretty generous upper limit; I’d put it several orders of magnitude lower!
I liked the SUB SCRIBE for ‘Jules Verne’, and as a big ‘The Third Man’ fan, the C REED clue.
Thanks to Eccles and John.
Gave up and looked up PUNDONOR, never really expecting it to be a real word. (POW) WOW.
BREEZE defeated me too, and I don’t think I’d have specified which answer I didn’t fill in unaided if I wasn’t in good company.
I noted that I liked NOTE. There will have been others, too. Like the ones mentioned above.
Thanks Eccles and John.
We enjoyed this. Some real ‘groan jokes’ though, in SERIAL NUMBER and PERSPIRE. We knew PUNDONOR because in Chambers 13th Edition it occurs at the top of the left hand column on a left hand page and so catches the eye; in fact I was thinking of using it in an S&B crossword sometime but now I’ll have to find a different way to clue it.
Too many good ones to nominate a CoD. Thanks, Eccles and John.
5D. Dear John
You asked how Collins was able to assess the frequency of word usage, which has intrigued me for some time. Having some idle moments I did some Googling and this came up and perhaps explains their results. Thank you as ever for your blogs.
https://collins.co.uk/pages/elt-cobuild-reference-the-collins-corpus
It took me far too long to see ABBA in 1a and PUNDONOR was entered tentatively at best. Liked SERIAL NUMBER and SUBSCRIBE. PERSPIRE was good too. Thanks Eccles and John.
Cheers, John, and all commenters.