Solving time – 10 minutes – would have been under 5 if I’d realised what what was going on in the middle “column” of the grid.
I started well with this one – easy clues, straightforward words, an over-reliance on clues where you have to remove parts of words in order to get anagram fodder, but generally OK. Then I came across a couple of clues that made me 23dn, and when I finally worked out 4d and 19dn, my lasting impression of the crossword was tainted.
ACROSS
9 – RECTO (Hidden)
11 – PENPUSHER – I assume the scratching refers to the olden days of quills?
12 – KEBAB – Nice wordplay
13 – BRISTOL – I’ve seen “Bristol fashion” come up a lot in recent crosswords, so got this immediately.
18 – SEN – a far eastern small value coin and South, East, North
25 – CURTAIN – C(U-RT)AIN where U = “universal” and “RT” = right, and CAIN is the murderer.
DOWN
3 – NON-U – Nu is a greek letter roughly equivalent to “N”. Also worth looking out for a host of other Greek characters which pop up regularly – ETA, MU, PI, CHI, PHI etc
4 and 19 – NICHOLAS NICKLEBY – Just not fair! Once you have all of the checked letters, it is fairly obvious, but I just can’t accept “CD” as a definition or indicator for Charles Dickens. I even checked to see if this was a valid abbreviation for him, but was unable to find anything.
7 – STABLE – “Good man” ALWAYS leads to ST (short for “saint”)
16 TITAN – TITIAN (Venetian artist) with the I (“one”) uplifted i.e.taken away
21 ANACONDA – A(N-AC-ON)DA – “Ada” holds “N A/C on”. What would setters do without people like Ada, Eve, Hal, Al or Ed?
23 – CRINGE – “ring” in “CE” (Church of England)
26 – RANK – double definition, but both from the same root, which I think many editors would find unacceptable.
28 – IFFY – “sniffy”without its first and second letters.
Wrt NN, I too needed most of the crossings before I got it but… I think the setter gave fair warning by emphasizing “initially” — which basically meant to me that it wouldn’t be an acronym that I was familiar with (e.g. compact disc or certificate of deposit): i.e. if it were either of those two, qualifying with “initially” wouldn’t have been necessary.
Could have been Clare Danes just as ‘fairly’, then! Not much fun, this one.
I’m with loonapick on this one. CD is just not an acceptable ‘clue’, otherwise the initials of all manners of people, places and things become valid. I wonder how many solvers instantly got the meaning in isolation, without having needed the cross-checking letters? I suspect very few if any and, for me, a clue becomes unfair if it cannot be solved as a clue in its own right.
Hang on everyone, Clare Danes hasn’t had much output that belongs in a library.
Clare Danes probably hasn’t. But what about Colin Dexter, creator of Inspector Morse?
But that’s what the crossing letters are there for. I think it’s a fair balance with enough info being supplied by both sides of the equation (SI and DD). Bottom-line is that we all disocvered NN eventually without recourse to googling I bet. At some point NICKLEBY becomes pretty unavoidable.
Yeah, but … it’s a yeah but.