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Vlad provides this morning’s challenge.
The puzzle contains trenchant comment, in both clues and answers, on our current woeful situation, in Vlad’s inimitable style. There’s some very clever cluing and ingenious devices – and a bit of parsing that has me beaten, so it’s over to you.
Many thanks to Vlad for an excellent, though depressing puzzle.
Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
1, 16 What greedy types have sadly doesn’t start to go away — so, in truth, it’s disgusting! (6,2,3,6)
SNOUTS IN THE TROUGH
An anagram [sadly] of [d]OESNT [minus initial letter – start to go away] SO IN TRUTH + UGH [it’s disgusting]
6 Endlessly rebel against exploitation — calm down! (6)
DEFUSE
DEF[y] [endlessly rebel against] + USE [exploitation]
10 Blast out rocks — not the full amount (8)
SUBTOTAL
An anagram [rocks] of BLAST OUT
11 Dives with power to crap — occasionally gull slightly worried tour leader (9)
PLUTOCRAT
An anagram [slightly worried?] of TO CRAP + alternate letters of gUlL + T[our]
Dives is the rich man in the parable in Luke 16:19, hence any very rich man
13 Be back at bottom (experienced recession) (5)
EBBED
A reversal [back] of BE + BED [bottom]
15 Businessman with nothing? Judgment needs reversing (3,3)
FAT CAT
A reversal [needs reversing] of TACT [judgment] + FA [nothing]
17 Lines in road, ones round new zone (6)
STANZA
ST[reet] [road] + A A [ones] round N [new] Z [zone]
18 Began to write in reference book (6)
OPENED
PEN [write] in Oxford English Dictionary [reference book]
19 Others in work turned over very quickly (6)
PRESTO
REST [others] in a reversal [turned over] of OP [work]
21 Financier (or crook) holding over ten million in Delhi (5)
CRORE
I had to reveal this: a new word for me, with unhelpful crossers – and I can’t see the wordplay [It’s hidden [reversed – over] in financiER OR Crook – thanks to Tomsdad and Frankie the cat]
22 Selfish speech involving quarrel over old school subject (9)
METALWORK
ME TALK [selfish speech] round a reversal [over] of ROW [quarrel] – it’s part of Design and Technology now
25 Sham! Sick country, one has to conclude (8)
ILLUSIVE
ILL [sick] + US [country] + I’VE [one has]
26 Artist reduced access (6)
INGRES
INGRES[s] [access]
28 Fruit harvest originally stops school in Provence (6)
LYCHEE
H[arvest] in LYCÉE [school in Provence]
29 Politician with reduced brainpower tries to spin (8)
MINISTER
MIN[d] [brainpower, reduced] + an anagram [to spin] of TRIES
Down
2 Cash needed to keep up a British institution, initially (3)
NHS
Hidden reversed [to keep up] in caSH Needed
3 Bright? Not when head’s gone (5)
UNLIT
[s]UNLIT [bright]
4 Battle of Britain? Let me think (one with many stories to tell) (10)
SKYSCRAPER
SKY SCRAP [as the Battle of Britain could be described] + ER [let me think] – ‘to tell’ indicates the homophone of ‘storeys’
5 A Sierra! Wrong about Clarkson’s last car (6)
NISSAN
A reversal [about] of A S [Sierra in NATO alphabet] + SIN [wrong] + [clarkso]N
6 Leaving university, coming out with this? (4)
DEBT
DEB[u]T [coming out, minus u [university]
7 Shamefully common places giving poor support, essentially (4,5)
FOOD BANKS
A particularly incisive definition but I can’t see any wordplay [The consensus – see comments below – seems to be that this is a cryptic definition [which was my own conclusion but I was afraid I might be missing something – again]
8 Effort unrewarded — left in bar at party (5,6)
SLAVE LABOUR
L [left] in SAVE [bar] + LABOUR [party]
12 Provided for Ellie splashing out — why one’s very easily led (4,2,5)
LIFE OF RILEY
An anagram [splashing out] of IF [provided] + FOR ELLIE + Y [why?]
14, 23 To save, I grant, was difficult with these (10,5)
STARVATION WAGES
An anagram [difficult] of TO SAVE I GRANT WAS – &lit
20 Get back from Uncle Ed’s in about eight minutes (tops) (6)
REDEEM
ED in RE [about] + first letters [tops] of Eight Minutes – Uncle is slang for pawnbroker
24, 9 Has meekly compromised over current British businessman (4,6)
MIKE ASHLEY
An anagram [compromised] of HAS MEEKLY round I [current] – here’s the latest on him
27 She‘s always short (3)
EVE
EVE[r] [always]
21ac is hidden in financier or crook.
I found this very tough.
Thanks Eileen and Vlad
Hi Eileen CRORE is backwards in financiER OR Crook
Sorry Tomsdad we crossed
Thank you both. So Vlad has followed the cardinal rule of giving a straightforward clue for a tricky answer – so straightforward that I missed it!
21ac was my last one in. I didn’t know the word but got it from the wordplay: Financier or crook holding over (i.e. containing backwards).
Like you, I couldn’t see any real wordplay in 7dn though, having spotted the theme, I was more than willing to forgive Vlad. An enjoyable comment on an appalling situation.
I shall think of 29ac in future when I see the Great Leader…
I didn’t know Uncle was slang for pawn broker so was perplexed by 20dn
Thanks, Eileen.
This must have been easier than the usual Vlad as I finished and in a reasonable time, albeit in two sittings.
I can’t see the explanation for 7d either – is it an &lit for the definition?
Thanks, Vlad
I thought 7d was supposed to be misdirection – we were supposed to read “poor” as “not very good”and then enjoy the “Aha!” moment when the answer came.
It worked for me, though I can see some might think the device had failed.
Thanks, Vlad and Eileen.
Thanks, Dave Ellison and Trismegistus – I agree with you re 7dn.
I think 7d is just a cryptic definition with a play on poor and essentially (i.e. essential food)
Yes, a Gordon Gekko scattergun theme, with the Minister for Snouts in the Trough whose job reference includes fat cat, plutocrat, crore of cash, no debt to redeem, mate of both said businessman and Jeremy Clarkson, though probably not a Nissan driver. Hey ho, lots of fun, although harder than many prize I thought.
And no, I too couldn’t find a proper parse for food banks. Vlad, if not always an impaler, is a bit of a slave driver: the anagram fodder for snouts etc took me ages, though to be fair that because was I’d forgotten that ‘it’s disgusting’ = ugh, a chestnut. Great workout, thanks V and E.
Well I got there but with a number unparsed. Having seen the explanations, I’m not sure I wanted them parsed – “snouts in the trough” being overly convoluted and “plutocrat” even more so. “food banks” was, in the end, just a cryptic-ish definition (I also settled on the “essential” bit as being key) so a bit ho-hum. I enjoy being misdirected cleverly. It just seemed to me that a few of these didn’t do that, but instead held my snout to a grindstone. A pity, because there were quite a few clever and enjoyable clues here. Thanks Vlad for the commentary, as if we needed reminding of how crap (to borrow his word) modern politics is, and thank you Eileen for unravelling so much of it.
Tough but satisfying to finish this one. My favourites were METALWORK, UNLIT, LYCHEE, LIFE OF RILEY.
New: snouts in the trough, Mike Ashley.
I could not parse food banks or plutocrat which I suspected was an anagram, but I mistakenly guessed that leader was the def.
Thanks Eileen and Vlad.
Rats! I confidently entered RAINY for 3d (fits the clue) which messed things up somewhat. Agree with the blog for the parsing of REDEEM but I had “get” as definition and back from unclE eD in RE + EM. This doesn’t really work since it should then be backs not back. Ah well, back to the drawing board.
Hovis@14 luckily I didnt think of RAINY which actually works apart from the crossers.
Thanks Eileen for blog and thanks Vlad for a dystopic but bluntly honest assessment of things in a clever, tricky puzzle.
And the correct quotation is “the LOVE of money is the root of all evil”
Back to the cricket.
Yes, very tough – couldn’t do a single clue for about ten minutes – so very pleased to finish. DEFUSE, SLAVE LABOUR and DEBT were my favourites. Many thanks to V & E.
Took me ages to get started and then the theme dawned on me and the answers began to flow. FOOD BANKS for instance became obvious once I had twigged what VLAD was referring to all the way though. I think this is the most overtly political statement I have ever experienced in a crossword, but none the worst for that especially in the Guardian. So many thanks VLAD more power to your elbow. There were many answers I got because of the theme that I could not parse so thank you Eileen for a wonderful job. Many many favourites but FAT CAT stood out as did SNOUTS IN THE TROUGH. I very much look forward to reading all the entries here in due course.
We had SHADE for 3d, as an anagram of HEADS.
Mrs Canthusus has just pointed out that it is a divided crossword – Fat cat, plutocrat, snouts in the trough, Mike Ashley in the left half; barely linked to the right half, where we have debt, slave labour, starvation wages and food banks.
Well spotted, Mrs C!
Good point Mrs C @ 18, makes the crossword even more telling!
Thanks both,
I was pleased about completing until I got here and realised my unparsed ‘NUS’ for 2d was wrong. 20d was my CotD.
The theme was good and helped in solving a few such as PLUTOCRAT, as I’d never heard of ‘Dives’.
Several went in unparsed and I’d never heard of CRORE either. Favourite bits were the SKY SCRAP for ‘Battle of Britain?’ and the ‘Get back from Uncle’ def.
Thanks to Vlad and Eileen
A slow steady solve with the theme only fully appreciated at completion- and good spotting MrsC@18, I missed that it was a crossword of 2 halves. Did not manage to fully parse SNOUTS IN THE TROUGH (missing the sad oesn’t and ugh). Also FOOD BANKS seemed a pointed definition- thanks to the comments above for showing the cryptic(ish) elements of the definition. I needed crossers and google confirmation re MIKE ASHLEY, as I had never heard of him – and wondered how much of the theme applies to him as opposed to fat cats in general. Loved the first part of the surface to PLUTOCRAT – dives with power to crap (over the rest of us) indeed.
Pointed, trenchant and political indeed – thanks to Vlad, Eileen and those commenting.
PS Copmus@15: Some translations have a slightly different version ie “the love of money is the root of many kinds of evil”, (which seems to me to be more accurate); I don’t know, however, what the original Greek says.
A puzzle to match the difficult time we’re going through at the moment, with some very clever highlighting of our divided society. I did see the theme very quickly for a change but needed a lot of help with parsing – didn’t finish as I was stuck on 2d, to my shame as I worked for that organisation for many years!
Thanks to Vlad for the challenge and to Eileen for her successful tackling of a Herculean task.
A brilliant puzzle, which seemed very tricky at first, but in the end nothing held me up for too long.
Thanks to Vlad and Eileen
Yes that was tough. A few comments:
For PLUTOCRAT, I got the meaning of Dives directly from the Latin. I was curious about Eileen’s explanation so I looked it up. Chambers had nothing. The online M-W had “Middle English, from Latin, rich, rich man; misunderstood as a proper name in Luke 16:19”. I now wonder what word was used in the original. Moving on …
As for FOOD BANKS, I’m with the non-cryptic camp. If the way you read it at first is the supposedly hidden way, there is no Aha moment, and it’s not cryptic.
Finally, in SKYSCRAPER I thought the B of B bit was nice, but it seems the clue as a whole has two cryptic halves. The definition is supposed to stand by itself, but if you have to apply some cryptic reasoning, in this case a homophone, then it’s not a definition any more, surely?
Thanks.
I was thoroughly impaled by Vlad this time–I had only about a third of it solved before I started using the cheat buttons, at which point I decided it probably wasn’t worth persevering. Thanks to him anyway.
Dr WhatsOn – I am no expert on the language, but according to this the original Greek has ???????? (transliterated plousios) for “rich man”, which also gives the root of such words as “plutocrat”
In the Vulgate the whole verse is Homo quidam erat dives, qui induebatur purpura et bysso, et epulabatur quotidie splendide.
Trying again with the Greek: πλούσιος
Re PLUTOCRAT: I think it’s actually the other way round: the Biblical character Dives was so named after the Latin “dives”, meaning “rich (person)”, related to “divine” etc. Apologies if someone has already said this.
Bizarelly, ‘crore’ was my first one in, having looked it up in the past when reading Indian comments in IT forums.
Re PLUTOCRAT: I’ve been out since late morning, so thanks, Andrew @29 and Geoff @31 for your explanations. I realise now that my ‘hence’ in the blog was misleading: I didn’t intend to imply that the character in the parable came first but I thought people were more likely to have heard of the parable of Dives and Lazarus than to know the Latin for ‘rich’. As Andrew rightly points out, the Latin Vulgate was a translation of the Greek – ???????? =’rich’. Note that in his quotation from the Vulgate, dives has no capital letter: ‘quidam [homo dives] ‘ means ‘a certain [rich man]’. It’s tradition that has made it a name.
Dr Whatson @27 – my Chambers gives ‘Dives: the rich man at whose gate Lazarus lay; a rich and luxurious person [L dives [rich (man), understood as a proper name]’
‘plousios’ came out perfectly [in Greek script] in my comment until I clicked ‘Post comment’!
I think the confusion on the Biblical side is whether the word was used as a name or an adjective.
Capitalization for proper names was not the convention as it is today when the text Andrew quoted was written. The word “dives” meaning rich was used in ancient Rome as a “cognomen”, one of the many parts of the Roman naming scheme. So what I conclude is that the word could have entered the language without the Bible, but most people who know it do know it that way.
4d. Surely you can’t have a homophone as the definition? The meaning here is buried too deep.
Keith Malin @36 – perhaps ‘homophone’ is the wrong word: ‘stories’ is the American spelling of ‘storeys’. I liked the clue.
Love the irony of the left side being the LIFE of RILEY etc and the right side being STARVATION WAGES etc. Never even finished (as ever) though I knew where it was going. Terrific tour de force and enjoyed more in coming here to be enlightened than actually cranium scratching. Congrats to Vlad and thanks to Eileen and other contributors.
Very tough solve – could only get about 80% of it. But very fair (didn’t care too much for 7 even though I got it…). Being of Indian origin, 21 was the first one in for me!
Eileen @37: Being in the US I thought the “to tell” was superfluous until I realized how it’s spelled (spelt?) on the other side of the pond – I did spell “labour” correctly though!
Thanks to Vlad. A plutocrat is more than a rich person. Plutocracy is the rule of the rich and a plutocrat is someone who rules by virtue of wealth. So Vlad’s ‘Dives [a rich man] with power’ is spot on.
Geoff Wilkins@31; I don’t think there is any link between the Latin “dives” (rich) and “divus” (divine); the latter links with “deus” (god). And since Roman emperors were often deified after their deaths, writers routinely referred to, say, “divus Augustus” to mean “the late Augusts”).
CRORE is common in Indian newspapers,as is LAKH. COD LYCHEE.
Hovis @14. Like you, I was fairly confident about [B]RAINY, but luckily I was using pencil (with eraser attached). As my family name’s Brown, I lost count of the number of times people thought they were clever saying “Don’t say brown,…”
This took me the whole duration of the Huddersfield to Birmingham train journey today. I totally missed the swipes at the theme answers, but now I see them, I approve. Tough, but fair, and ultimately enjoyable.
Thanks to Eileen and Vlad.
Very many thanks to all for the helpful comments.
I did actually detect a developing right / left hand split when I was solving but, with the pressure to post a blog, I didn’t follow it up, so huge thanks to Mr and Mrs Carputhusus @18 for pointing it out and adding confirmation to this as a great puzzle. Many thanks, again, to Vlad.
Wow, a tour de force to split this crossword down the middle!
At first reading I wondered if the reference to Clarkson’s last car might be HE-ARSE bu no such luck.
Had (B)Rainy for 3 down, so that didn’t help matters..
Many thanks to Eileen for a very nice blog and to others who took the trouble to comment.
We didn’t think this was Vlad at his toughest but for some reason it’s always a joy to see a crossword (and surfaces, in particular) in which the setter takes a political stance.
Of course, that’s nothing new when it comes to Vlad.
PLUTOCRAT (11ac) fell in place late on from the crossers but we never got round to fully explain things.
Does Vlad use ‘slightly worried’ because ‘to crap’ is already for the most part in it?
And as a non-Biblical person I couldn’t make anything of ‘Dives’.
To me, these are just seedy nightclubs.
We thought, in 12ac Vlad was balancing on the edge of ‘indirect anagrams’ by including IF = ‘provided’.
Very nice crossword (even if I still cannot get used the odd cryptic definition (today’s 7d)).
Shameful they are, though.
Many thanks to Eileen & Vlad.
Thanks to Vlad for the wonderful crossword and to Eileen for the explanations.
In 4, I think the ‘tell’ is ‘count’.
Very nicely written puzzle and such a clever design for a rather sad theme.
Sil@50. I differed slightly from Eileen’s parse for 12. I had it as IF + an anagram (splashing) of FOR ELLIE outside (out) + Y (why in texts), so I don’t think there’s a need to invoke an indirect anagram.
Thanks, Vlad and Eileen for the ones I couldn’t see (PLUTOCRAT and SKYSCRAPER).
Great puzzle: came to it very late but glad I didn’t miss it. Many thanks Vlad. Really appreciated the blog for parsing of some like 11a PLUTOCRAT (even though I know the Dives and Lazarus story) and 4d, SKYSCRAPER, Eileen. I had to look up 21- CRORE. A very interesting blog to read too. As several said, an apposite commentary on the state of the world, particularly the rich/poor divide.
I agree with beery!
I have to post my defence for FOOD BANKS which was one of my favourite clues; a lovely CD, I thought, with a very definite, albeit poignant, ‘aha’ moment – “shamefully” being its most telling ingredient. I also ticked SKYSCRAPER and am surprised others have seen fit to criticise it.
(btw – not sure that STARVATION WAGES constitutes a true &lit, by dint of the inclusion of “(with) these”; more an ‘extended definition’ or ‘WIWD’ (‘wordplay intertwined with definition’ – I think) type clue?)
A trenchant work, indeed, yet still most entertaining.
Many thanks, both and all.
CRORE will also be familiar to anyone who has read a few Indian novels.
Posting the morning after, as I was late to start and finish this, but it was such a tour de force that comment is needed. I have been utterly defeated by the Impaler in the past, and this was tough at first, but so satisfying to complete, with any number of pleasing clues, almost all of them tied together by a timely and relatable theme. The Left/Right divide was a great spot by Mrs C @18!
CRORE was new to me, but I’m getting better at spotting hidden answers, forward or backward. And when I spot an answer that Eileen doesn’t, that is truly a rare thing!
‘Dives’/PLUTOCRAT was also unfamiliar, and as I make it my business not to know what is in the Bible, being a bloody-minded atheist, I was at a disadvantage with the definition if not the parsing.
Many favourites, particularly the “politician with reduced brain power” and “Uncle Ed”, as well as ME TALK and SKY SCRAP.
Many thanks to V and E.
That’s it, phitonelly @ 52.
No indirect anagram, although I never get a warm feeling inside when setters use ‘out’ this way.