Everyman continues to produce generally pleasing puzzles within the remit of being accessible and without obscurities. In my opinion, his/her crosswords are let down sometimes by looseness of cluing and clunkiness of surface. That’s just me though.
As we have come to expect, there are two paired clues: in this offering, they are SINKING FEELING and SWIMMING TRUNKS. The SINK OR SWIM reference is well served by them both being down clues.
Abbreviations
cd cryptic definition
dd double definition
cad clue as definition
(xxxx)* anagram
anagrind = anagram indicator
[x] letter(s) removed
definitions are underlined
Across
1 A loud attack? Well, sadly, yes (6,2)
AFRAID SO
A charade of A, F for musically ‘loud’, RAID and SO.
5 Wipes beer mats less regularly (6)
ERASES
The even letters of bEeR mAtS lEsS.
10 Perhaps Netanyahu is PM losing backing of Likud (7)
ISRAELI
[D]ISRAELI
11 Engage some dim Merseybeaters (7)
IMMERSE
Hidden in dIM MERSEysider.
12 After review, hotel won’t accommodate screeching infant (5)
OWLET
Hidden reversed in hoTEL WOn’t.
13 Discerning acts of love (6,3)
MAKING OUT
A dd, although the second definition is really only first base when it comes to an act of love.
14 Hide with Star Trek character getting emaciated (4,3,5)
SKIN AND BONES
A charade of SKIN, AND and BONES. For non-Trekkies, BONES was the nickname of Dr Leonard McCoy in the original series. ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.’
18 She’d start off falteringly, less likely to get job done (5-7)
SHORT-STAFFED
(SHED START OFF)*
21 Cook cassoulet? It’s not worth the effort (4,5)
LOST CAUSE
(CASSOULET)*
23 Back-to-back houses leading to a fuss (3-2)
HOO-HA
HO is the abbreviation for ‘house’. Put two of those ‘back-to-back’, add A and you’ve got your answer.
24 Draw what to put on horse, an ornamental trinket (3-4)
TIE-BACK TIE-TACK
I have some niggles about this. It’s a charade of TIE and BACK. In many sports, TIE and ‘draw’ are not the same thing, but that’s not my niggle. You can BACK a horse, but surely that’s not what you ‘put on it’. A TIE-BACK, for me, is what you use to hold back an open curtain. I wouldn’t describe that as a ‘trinket’. And while we’re about it, the surface is pretty meaningless.
Edit: My mistake: the answer is in fact TIE-TACK. It’s not in my Collins (which has TIE CLASP and TIE PIN) but it is in Chambers (but not hyphenated). So it’s a charade of TIE and TACK in its horsey sense. Apologies, and thanks to those who pointed out my error.
25 Increases likelihood of popular verse in, for starters, Times Educational Supplement (7)
INVITES
A charade of IN, V and I for the first letters of ‘verse’ and ‘in’, and TES for the weekly publication bought most often for its job adverts (well, it used to be at least). ‘Labour invited criticism over its choice of leader.’
26 Composed, seated, relaxed (6)
SEDATE
(SEATED)*
27 Vacantly using authoritarian dogma, nicks Africans (8)
UGANDANS
The outside letters (‘vacantly’) of the second, third, fourth and fifth words of the clue. This surface is, for me, entirely meaningless. We’ll be in ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ territory next.
Down
1 A child’s key (1,5)
A MINOR
A charade of A and MINOR gives you the musical key that is the relative minor of C major.
2 Once in a blue moon, rate cut in half by bank (6)
RARELY
A charade of RA[TE] and RELY.
3 Bizarrely, I twice knitted image of suspect (6-3)
IDENTI-KIT
(I I KNITTED)*
4 What’s seen with floating torsos? (8,6)
SWIMMING TRUNKS
I didn’t much like this either, I’m afraid. I suppose it’s a cd. TRUNKS are ‘torsos’, but SWIMMING isn’t the same as ‘floating’. I suppose if torsos were floating in the pool they might be wearing SWIMMING TRUNKS.
6 Type such as Abramovich (5)
ROMAN
A dd. In typography, ROMAN is one of the main variants (Times New Roman is the default type on most word-processing programs); ROMAN Abramovich is a Russian oligarch best known in this country for being the owner of Chelsea FC.
7 Gentleman with symbol of potency: red meat (8)
SIRLOINS
A charade of SIR and LOINS.
8 ‘Most fragrant’ wife involved as judge presides over trial (8)
SWEETEST
An insertion of W in SEE for one of the senses of ‘judge’ followed by TEST. ‘Presides over’ works because it’s a down clue. Another meaningless surface? Pas du tout: it’s a brilliant reference to the libel trial of the subsequently disgraced Jeffrey Archer in 1987. You can learn or remind yourself about it here, but essentially the Daily Star outed Archer (author and then deputy chairman of the Conservative Party) as having used the services of a prostitute at a time when the Tories were promoting family values. The judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, was mainly responsible for Archer’s acquittal because of his summing up. This part of it has gone down in legal history:
“Remember Mrs Archer in the witness box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance?” Living with her, how could Archer ever be “in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel?”
Archer won the case, but it came back to court 14 years later when he was convicted of perjury and jailed for four years. Senior Conservatives telling major porkies. Wouldn’t happen now.
9 Single fine king uneasily delivers premonition (7,7)
SINKING FEELING
(SINGLE FINE KING)*
15 He arranged veg on hot cooker (9)
BEETHOVEN
A charade of BEET, H and OVEN.
16 Vis-à-vis Ola, Tess largely makes interaction impossible (8)
ISOLATES
Hidden in vis-a-vIS OLA TESs.
17 Relaxed with name dropping? Something to explain (5,3)
LOOSE END
‘Relaxed’ is a synonym for LOOSENED. If you ‘drop’ or lower the N FOR ‘name’ one place, you’ve got the answer.
19 Cirro-strati partially forming platforms (6)
ROSTRA
Yet another hidden answer: in cirRO-STRAti. A plural of ROSTRUM. Fair enough, but I would never use it. Referenda, always; stadia, sometimes; but rostra? Naah.
20 Passes, lacking energy, making errors (6)
LAPSES
[E]LAPSES
22 Gold is one asset initially included in valuation (5)
COAST
An insertion of A for the first letter of ‘asset’ in COST. The Gold Coast is a region south of Brisbane in Australia.
Many thanks to Everyman for this morning’s puzzle.
Pierre
Some of your problems with 24A would seem less pressing if you had given the answer as TIE-TACK.
PeterO — yes, 24A has to be TIE-TACK, which is not an expression I have ever encountered outside a dictionary.
My favourites were SWIMMING TRUNKS, LOOSE END.
I also had entered TIE-BACK as my answer for 24a. How to parse TIE-TACK? I am confused now…
Thanks Everyman and Pierre
ignore my question above
found it:
tack = equipment used in horse riding, including the saddle and bridle.
I had not heard of this usage of the word ‘tack’ before.
Thank you, overnighters. My bad with 24ac; blog corrected. Still not in love with the surface, though.
I was looking for some hidden analogues as in recent puzzles. The nearest I could find were Swimming and Sinking while 18A and 24D have SHORT-S and TRUNKS. Somehow I expected SKIN AND BONES to have a link with elsewhere. However I think I was chasing a 21A unless anyone else cracked the code
Thanks, Pierre.
I too had TIE BACK, figuring that when you back a horse you put a bet on it. Before I got 22d I had thought about TIE CLIP, but that’s only because TIE TACK was too unfamiliar.
For those us us who remember 1957, GOLD COAST brings to mind the pre-independence name of Ghana rather than any other Gold Coasts.
I too put in TIE BACK at 24a but I couldn’t really make sense of it. Thanks to PeterO for the correct answer.
1d A MINOR may have been simple but I really liked it. (What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft? A flat minor.) I also liked the slightly weird surface of 3d. But as you say Pierre, 8d SWEETEST was brilliant with its allusion to the Archer case.
Many thanks Everyman and Pierre.
Thank you Everyman for an enjoyable puzzle and Pierre for a helpful blog – well spotted as regards the brilliant 8d.
As regards 4d, the COED gives for swim “3 v. intr. float on or at the surface of a liquid (bubbles swimming on the surface).”
In 27ac see ‘vacantly’ as without thinking and ‘nick’ as arrest and you get a wonderfully Guardian surface about an institutionally racist police officer.
Regularly enjoying Everyman again, thanks!
Blithering idiot that I am, all I could think of for 22D was CARAT, which didn’t feel at all right and also didn’t work with TIE-BACK – which didn’t feel at all right either, not being an ornamental trinket. I’m now kicking myself about COAST, but would never have considered TIE-TACK a proper term. Oh well, better luck next time. Thank you Everyman for an entertaining couple of hours on a cold, wet, depressing Sunday morning, and to the peerless Pierre for the blog – especially for reminding me about the shamefully-partisan ruling referred to in 8D. Plus ça change…
Re 19d: yes, ROSTRA is a fairly rare plural, but it’s valid. I work with a local opera company, and we use platform blocks of various sizes to add height at the back and sides of the stage. We call them rostra.
Thanks Everyman and Pierre.
Opera is quite posh, though, Quirister. If you’d been staging Look Back in Anger, you’d have called them rostrums …
Everyman here. Yes, the UGANDANS clue was inspired by stop and search and SWEETEST by Archer, with a quiet tip of the hat to a truly great clue, Araucaris’s ‘Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3, 3, 8, 12)”. Happy Christmas to all!
‘Auracaris’, there, also known as Sinephile. Note to self: don’t use social media in supermarket queue.
Everyman, as I remember, Araucaria’s pseudonym when setting the FT crossword, was “cinephile”.
The spelling is important because it is an anagram of Chile Pine, another name for the Monkey Puzzle tree, Araucaria araucana, which, according to Wikipedia, is the hardiest species in the conifer genus Araucaria.
See https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/2013/nov/26/araucaria-john-graham
Thanks for dropping in, Everyman, and thanks also for all the puzzles during 2019.
Adrianw, I think you’ve missed the joke in Everyman’s comment @15. Humour sometimes gets lost in cyberspace …
With apologies to Everyman; Pierre, thanks for pointing out that although the misplaced “s” in @15 had been a typo, his misplaced “s” in @16 was deliberate.
I had very much enjoyed the reference to the Jeffrey Archer case in 22d. The judge’s description of Archer’s wife, once heard, is hard to forget.
And thanks to Everyman @14 for reminding me of the “surprisingly chaste Lord Archer” clue. I first came across it in Sandy Balfour’s “Pretty Girl In Crimson Rose: A Memoir of Love, Exile and Crosswords” (2004), highly recommended for all lovers of cryptic crosswords. Still available from a well-known online bookseller.
Started off wonderfully in NW corner, although down in Sthn hemisphere I am sure an identikit is one word? Maybe not. Then the rest got harder. Got all but 4 and like another comment, had carat for 22d for a while Liked A Minor also, Skin and Bones, Owlet and Hoo Ha. Did not understand Tie Tack at all, glad to know not even all the men know it. Thought there might have been plenty of other ways to clue 16d rather than what we got. Thought it was an odd clue for an answer not difficult to dream up a clue for. Few too many anagrams but at least they help me along
Great puzzle with some excellent surfaces. Completely missed the Archer reference but enjoyed 1ac (sadly misdirected) 2d (maybe not so rare lately), and 22d (fools’ gold).
Thanks Everyman & Pierre.
Thought this was a good puzzle. I had no problems with tie tack (24 across) an expression quite familiar to me, and I would have to anyone. Nor did I have problems with swimming=floating.
Couldn’t fully parse 17D and had to check that a tie tack is a thing, but I felt this puzzle was much tighter than some of late. Thanks Everyman.