Independent 10,647 / Knut

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There is something for everyone in today’s crossword, which has been set by Knut.

This medium-difficulty puzzle can best be described as a treasure trove, full of goodies to suit all tastes, from music via classic comedy and contemporary politics to cricket. Some solvers might not appreciate having so much general knowledge in a cryptic crossword, but since most of us have Google to hand, I don’t mind having to come out of my comfort zone and venture into K-Pop, say, if I get a varied, colourful puzzle in exchange.

I think that I am happy with my parsing overall, but I would appreciate confirmation at 10 and 25. I have also been a little vague on the incidents between Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Strauss that are alluded to here at 1 – were these precise words actually used?

My favourite clues today are 9D, for originality; 12 and 13, for overall construction; and 8, 17D and 28, all for making me laugh out loud when the penny dropped. Indeed, full marks for sheer entertainment value, Knut, from this solver at least.

*(…) indicates an anagram; definitions are italicised; // separates definitions in multiple-definition clues

Across    
     
01 KEVIN PIETERSEN Pike intervenes misguidedly – stupid boy, 16, as 23 would say

*(PIKE INTERVENES); “misguidedly” is anagram indicator; the reference is to the stormy relationship between former England cricket captain Andrew Strauss (=entry at 23) and team member Kevin Pietersen, referred to as a “bigmouth (=entry at 16)”
     
09 THE SMITHS Delia’s family group

Cryptically, celebrity chef Delia Smith’s family could be referred to as “the Smiths”; the reference is to the 1980s English rock band The Smiths
     
10 EVENS The odds of 7 spades to finish?

SEVEN (=7); “spades (=S, in cards) to finish” means letter “s” is moved to the end of the word
     
11 CORONER Conservative old individual received by king and queen; he’s often in court

C (=Conservative) + O (=old) + {ONE (=individual) in [R (=king, i.e. rex) + R (=queen, i.e. regina)]}
     
12 TANGELO Fruit flavour – peeled cantaloupe?

TANG (=flavour) + <m>ELO<n> (=cantaloupe?, i.e. a type of melon); a tangelo is a hybrid between a tangerine orange and a pomelo
     
13 TABLE MAT Thanks! Fresh Melba toast out of the oven – put it on here!

TA (=thanks) + *(MELBA) + T<oast> (“out of the oven (=oast)” means letters “oast” are dropped); “fresh” is anagram indicator
     
14 ALSACE Pacino first to salute unbeatable service here in France

AL (=Pacino, i.e. US actor) + S<alute> (“first to” means first letter only is used) + ACE (=unbeatable service, in tennis)
     
15 APE-MAN He must have sent Jane bananas!

Cryptic definition: Tarzan no doubt gave Jane bananas to eat!
     
19 DIASPORA Spoken about men in annual mass migration

DIAS (SAID=spoken; “about”’ indicates reversal) + [OR (=men, i.e. other ranks) + P.A. (=annually, i.e. per annum)]
     
23 STRAUSS Composer // who got crotchety with 1?

Double definition: the reference is to German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) AND to English cricketer Andrew Strauss (1977-); see explanation at 1
     
25 MIRANDA A tempestuous character, mother pocketed R1

1 RAND (=R1, where R=rand, the South African currency) in MA (=mother)
     
26 NOMAD Order Ms Dorries out – she doesn’t belong in The House

OM (=order, i.e. Order of Merit) in NAD (=Ms Dorries, i.e. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries); cryptically, a nomad doesn’t belong in a single “house”, but rather moves around
     
27 CHUCKED IN After 28 maybe dine out, included at no extra cost

CHUCK (=diminutive form of Charlie, entry at 28) + *(DINE); “out” is anagram indicator
     
28 CHARLIE CHESTER Stupid boy boobs in front of The Queen – he made us laugh

CHARLIE (=stupid boy, fool) + CHEST (=boobs, breasts) + ER (=the Queen); the reference is to English comedian Charlie Chester (1914-97)
     
Down    
     
02 EXECRABLE Repulsive former English LibDem leader crushing resistance

EX- (=former) + E (=English) + [R (=resistance, in electronics) in CABLE (=LibDem leader, i.e. Vince Cable)]
     
03 IMMENSE Huge blokes, drunk, semi-clad

MEN (=blokes) in *(SEMI); “drunk” is anagram indicator
     
04 PETER PAN 6 boy safe on sleepover

PETER (=safe, till) + PAN (NAP=sleep; “over”’ indicates reversal); Peter Pan is an “eternal (=entry at 6) boy”, who never grew up, in the book by J M Barrie
     
05 ERSATZ Substitute loading containers at Zeebrugge

Hidden (“loading”) in “containERS AT Zeebrugge”
     
06 ETERNAL Nice summer rental, saving energy and time without end

ETE (=Nice summer, i.e. the French word for summer) + R<e>N<t>AL (“saving energy (=E) and time (=T)” means letters “e” and “t” are dropped)
     
07 SUEDE Reportedly influenced band

Homophone (“reportedly”) of “swayed (=influenced)”; the reference is to the English rock band Suede, formed in 1989
     
08 NO SCORE Conk broken by my duck

COR (=my, wow, as exclamations) in NOSE (=conk); a duck is a zero score in cricket
     
09 TACIT Understood 1ac anagram in Times

*(1AC) in T T (=Times, i.e. 2 x T=time)
     
15 AMOUNT DUE Autumn ode composed – it’s outstanding

*(AUTUMN ODE); “composed” is anagram indicator
     
16/20/21 BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN Gossip downs tools once more, hit by 9ac

BIGMOUTH (=gossip, indiscreet person) + STRIKES (=downs tools) + AGAIN (=once more); Bigmouth Strikes Again was a 1986 hit for The Smiths
     
17 ARSENIC As bottom cut short?

ARSE (=bottom) + NIC<k> (=cut; “short” means last letter is dropped); As is the chemical formula for arsenic!
     
18 ARUNDEL From Kenya, run delicatessen somewhere in Sussex

Hidden (“from”) in “kenyA RUN DELicatessen”
     
22 PSYCHE K-Pop star’s revolutionary spirit

PSY (=K-Pop star, i.e. on the South Korean pop scene) + CHE (=revolutionary, i.e. Che Guevara)
     
24 RUMBA Measure, say, Reading University business degree

R (=reading, i.e. one of the three R’s) + U (=university) + MBA (=business degree, i.e. Master of Business Administration)
     
     

 

31 comments on “Independent 10,647 / Knut”

  1. Nothing wrong with either parsing, the character being from The Tempest.

    I can’t repeat the actual word accidentally aired on live TV by Strauss to describe KP when he thought the mike was off – it was a commercial break, but not everywhere – save to say it’s a homophone of an anagram of the setter…

  2. Cricket again!  As yesterday, no complaints from me, but I’ll be interested to hear whether others think the Pietersen/Strauss row is general-enough knowledge to be fair game.  I also don’t know whether AS actually did refer to KP as a BIGMOUTH, or whether it’s simply the sort of thing that he might have said.  Look forward to further explanation of this.

    Lots of good fun, with the various linkages between different clues and answers, and then the unlinked stupid boys in 1a and 28a.

    We got Psy without too much difficulty (probably mainly because of Ed Balls’s tribute on Strictly, if I’m honest), but that just about exhausted our knowledge of K-Pop!

    Thanks to Knut and to RR.

  3. Needed Google for this one, being unfamiliar with K-Pop and The Smith’s. Like the Captain Mainwaring quote from Dad’s Army in 1a. Can someone help me out with Measure in 24d?

  4. An entertaining solve as always from this setter.  Just to expand on Hw7’s explanation of Strauss’s remark, he called Pietersen (inadvertently, live on air) an ‘absolute cnut’.

    Thanks to RR for blogging.

  5. A splendid treat from Knut – hard to pick favourites but I’d go for 9a, 17a, 25a (having studied The Tempest that one went straight in)

    Thanks to Knut and RR

     

    NNI@3  a ‘measure’ is another word for a dance

  6. Thanks for an excellent blog, RR – great preamble, which says it all.

    I’d go for crypticsue’s favourites, with the addition of 12, 13 and 19ac and 2, 9 and 18dn. (Vince seems to get more attention in crosswords than he ever did as leader.)

    [A blast from the past for me: as a student, I spent one summer vac working as a waitress in a restaurant in Great Yarmouth and served Charlie Chester his lunch a number of times, as he was doing a summer season on the Pier.]

    Many thanks to Knut for the splendid treat and a lot of fun.

     

     

  7. crypticsue@5
    Thanks for clearing that up. I should have looked it up in my old tattered 1972 version of Chambers, which I can reach without getting out of my chair.

  8. DavidO@2 My view is ultimately any ‘general knowledge’ in a grid is acceptable, though of course there is the danger it becomes too easy or too difficult depending on the solver’s knowledge, but is that greatly different to their range of vocabulary which is always being tested? I am sure there is some license here to assist the wordplay and link the clues.

    For what it’s worth, I cheated slightly on the k-pop as I knew a song by the act and googled that, I failed on the Tempest, but cricket and the Smiths were big stealers of my mis-spent youth (and middle age)

  9. I really couldnt remember the Smiths title but I got it from the crossers and the neat wordplay. Discovered I had the album (or some compilation on vinyl).Lovely track .I think Stephen Street produced it-great use of guitars

    Great puzzle connecting Bigmouth, KP and Strauss not to mention Suede and Smiths. Really good fun.

    Thanks RR and Knut

  10. Not much to add to other approving comments. One query, though – is Nad really a generally used shortening of Nadine? I’ve never come across it and I don’t think there was anything in the clue to suggest using only some of the letters. Though I could very well have missed it, despite the excellent blog! Thanks to both.

  11. JJ @ 10: I’ve never heard of it either. The only use of “nad” i am familiar with is short for “gonad”, as in “kick him in the nads.”

  12. Sorry but I didn’t really enjoy this: too many (for me) obscurities requiring specialist knowledge and online searches.  But thanks to Knut for the effort and RatkojaRiku for the blog.

  13. Thanks to RatkojaRiku for your very generous blog and to those who have commented. This puzzle was prompted by a – to my mind, utterly brainless – exchange on Twitter between Kevin Pietersen and Piers Morgan which caused this woke, Remoaner snowflake to melt. I have taken down my bedroom posters of Boycs, Botham, Vaughan & now KP .

    I’ve used the Nad = Nadine familiar name a couple of times before, I think – sorry if it seems a bit loose.

    best wishes to all Rob/Knut

  14. Thoroughly enjoyed this with many a smile as various misdirects, allusions and connections all worked themselves out.  Hugely satisfactory to end up with everything solved and parsed – bar one.  (NOMAD was wrongly parsed: I recalled her being called Mad Nad in the tabloids and “No Mad” vaguely suggested she was not wanted ie. ordered out.  How wrong can you be?)  I never followed the Smiths and I’m not a particular fan of cricket but my GK stretched far enough to cope with the references and I assumed BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN to be something else said of KP, only learning my mistake when Googling the phrase and discovering the Smiths number.  Like DavidO, I enjoyed the double reference to ‘stupid boy’ (although, from 1a onwards, I was looking without success for another Dad’s Army reference).

    Maybe I’m just in a generous mood as a result of the solve but I felt I could have given a tick to just about everything here today.  I’ve re-read the clues several times since finishing and the surfaces are smooth and succinct almost without exception, there were several clever clueing devices (‘spades to finish’, ‘out of the oven’, ‘drunk semi-clad’ and the slightly more frequent but well-disguised ‘Nice summer’), some lovely anagrams (‘Pike intervenes’ and ‘Autumn Ode’) and cunning definitions of which ‘measure’ (unlike crypticsue I had to Google to check it meant dance) was the slyest.

    Thanks Knut and RR.

  15. Jayjay @ 10 & Goujeers @ 11

    Adding to Knut’s comment at 13, the very dim right-wing politician Nadine Dorries, known for her sometimes barking ideas, is commonly known as ’Mad Nad’.

  16. The various cross-references made this a bit of a tricky solve, but we sorted it out in the end with the aid of a bit of googling to supplement our abysmal knowledge of rock and pop bands.  MIRANDA was our favourite, mainly because one of us, like crypticsue, had studied The Tempest for O level – we won’t tell you how many years ago.

    Thanks, Knut and RatkojaRiku

  17. Thanks to Knut for popping in to explain NAD. I’ve never come across that before, but I’ve only ever met one person called Nadine (not this one), and no one ever called her anything but her full name.

    I wasn’t sure about annual=PA, and I see RatkojaRiku has used annually in the explanation. Are these equivalent? The other where I couldn’t fully parse the clue was my=COR, but that’s just because I got the answer without needing to parse!

    I liked the devices mentioned by Mark @14, and R1 for the middle part of MIRANDA, but in 6d ETERNAL isn’t “rental, saving energy and time” a bit off? When we say “save energy and time” we mean except E & T, but doesn’t saving mean that we retain or keep hold of, rather than dropping them? I’d welcome suggestions for a use of saving that works here, because I like the idea but I’m not quite convinced. (I always think of the French traffic sign sauf livraisons when I think of save in this context; for saving I’m stuck with “saving your presence”, which doesn’t seem to mean “excepting”.)

    Thanks to Knut for the crossword – I found the balance of GK about right, though I’ve never heard of K-Pop! And thanks to RR for a very thorough blog.

  18. Really lovely crossword – thanks Knut. I expected a Dad’s Army theme at first, which would have been great but it also hit my spot as a bit of a fan of The Smiths and Suede for that matter, and a pretty avid watcher of cricket back in the days of Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Strauss. I also liked the use of small sub-themes that could be linked together in a bit of a chain and it seemed at times as though every clue I tried was reliant on others I hadn’t got. I really liked misdirections of As = Arsenic, 1ac anagram in Times for TACIT, R1 = IRAND and “Odds of 7” referring to SEVEN rather than the odd letter 7D SUEDE, which I tried at first.

  19. Thanks to Knut and RatkojaRiku. A bit too obscure for us today, especially with the 1a/23 circular reference. Also, how does odds mean evens? Nevertheless, did have fun with Arsenic in 17d 🙂

  20. Yeesh.  I get that the Independent (unlike the Guardian) doesn’t circulate much outside the UK, but for a foreign solver this was impenetrable without a lot of guess-and-Google.  Cricket of course doesn’t rate here in the US at all; I’d heard of Kevin Pietersen only because I make vague periodic efforts to pay attention to cricket (I like the game, it just doesn’t reach us often), never mind knowing of his relationship with Andrew Strauss–there’s no clue at all we’re talking about cricket rather than music there.  He was my last one in–I needed every crossing letter to construct what the name had to be from the anagram fodder.  And I had to look up a list of Smiths songs–I had college classmates who were into them, but I wasn’t one of them.  Also unfamiliar with Charlie Chester; fortunately the clue for that one was pretty straightforward.

    So to sum up, I did get there in the end, but was baffled by a lot of this even after it was all solved.  Thanks for the explanations.

  21. Labradoodle @19. It’s bookmakers odds, reflecting probable outcomes of a wager. (Also used in expressions like, “The odds are it’s going to rain today.”) EVENS, or even money, is where you win the same as your stake, written as 1/1.

  22. sheffield hatter @17 Is it save meaning ‘apart from’ as in Luton have drawn all their fixtures in November save for an away win at Rotherham.

  23. what i like about a good crossword is the u actually learn the general knowledge from it… if its clued appropriately..so Knut.. Chapeau! i had no real insight into Kevin Pietersen, Strauss (the cricketer), or Ms Dorries.. i guess its swings and roundabouts as I have heard of Al Pacino so 14ac wrote itself..

    nice start to the day..

    thanks RatkojaRiku and Knut

  24. Hi sheffield hatter @17

    Re 19ac: PA – per annum = annually works for me.

    Re 6dn ‘saving’: I confess that I didn’t give this much thought when solving. Like you, I’m familiar with save = except, so I think I must have assumed, without looking it up*, that saving probably had the same meaning – and I now find that Chambers gives saving = excepting (as well as protecting, preserving, etc) , so it’s one of those autantonyms that we discuss here from time to time.

    (*Knut is one of those setters the integrity of whose clues I’ve always had complete faith in. Try expressing that without ending with a preposition! How often have I wished for an adjective from ‘integrity’!)

  25. Penfold [thanks for the reminder that we’ve beaten Rotherham away!] and Eileen. Thanks for replying. I had no problem with ‘save’, but I wasn’t sure it extended to ‘saving’, not being able to think of a situation where it would be used. But if it’s in Chambers…

    I take your point, Eileen, about trusting the setter. I do wonder about DIASPORA though. The clue reads ‘Spoken about men in annual mass migration’, where annual=PA. But both the blogger and you have said ‘annually’. Is annually the same as annual? Perhaps I’m overthinking this – after all, I had no problem solving the clue!

  26. Eileen @ 24

    I suspect this may be a case of meaning divergence from the same root: where the noun INTEGRITY used to have INTEGRAL as its adjective, the former now refers to character while the latter refers to completeness. Possibly, though, one may be able to refer to the integrity of eg a proof.

  27. ‘I’ve always had complete faith in the integrity of Knut’s clues.’ (Eileen@24)

    But why does one need to bother about not ending a sentence with a preposition? It’s only some rule that someone has announced, and it’s quite unnecessary, like lots of other rules about things like split infinitives and not starting sentences with ‘And’ or ‘Because’. The language is what people use, and that’s that.

    Now crossword rules, that’s something different …!

  28. Hmm – late as usual but the worst kind of ‘theme’ for me.
    Loads of cross-referenced clues, obscure (not general) knowledge and no real chance of completing without recourse to Google.

    What’s to like??

  30. @reddevil & Hovis…I understand; sorry you didn’t enjoy the puzzle – I knew it wasn’t going to appeal to everyone. See you next time, hopefully

  31. I liked the cricket but general knowledge” surely doesn’t require us to remember anything about the horrific Smiths?

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