Guardian 28,394 – Brendan

60 comments on “Guardian 28,394 – Brendan”

1. A few unknown words in there but all gettable from the clues. Very clever Brendan, thank you… and thanks to Andrew for the parsing.

2. I’m sure our Australian contingent will soon weigh in on the definition of November as a cold part of the year. And I do quibble with “partly withdraw” as a definition of SECEDE. The “partly” isn’t just superfluous, it’s inaccurate.

   But I’m quibbling with what’s otherwise a brilliant puzzle. Thanks to Brendan.

3. Yes, clever stuff. I particularly liked OCTUPLET, but I had ‘Part of big issue to be raised’ as the definition, with ‘increased’ giving ‘UP’.

   Thanks Brendan and Andrew

4. Surely November is v inside no ember

5. A very cleverly constructed crossword as always from Brendan. I think the “partly withdraw” in 7d is a bit cryptic, suggesting the withdrawal of a part (of a country) from the whole.

   Many thanks Brendan and Andrew.

6. A difficult but fun challenge. Did half of this quite quickly then slowed down and got stuck.

   Favourites: NOVEMBER, RED TAPE, COMB (loi).
   New: GUILLOTINE = (in parliament) a procedure used to prevent delay in the discussion of a legislative bill; ESPARTO.

   Thanks, Brendan and Andrew.

   I agree with Toadfather @ 4 that November is V in NO EMBER.

7. The whole is greater than the parts today. A clever use of a theme. Indeed, as Andrew points out, two themes (and see below). Possibly causing a little bit of pushing the envelope but nothing that prevented a solve. I parsed OCTUPLET as Penfold @3 and didn’t parse SECEDE at all.

   A lovely anagram for DRAMATIS PERSONAE, BOTTOMLESS raised a smile, GUILLOTINE was nicely assembled and ANTIMATTER is a lovely lurker.

   Themes can be in the eye of the beholder – I spotted one last week that wasn’t. If one was to be so minded, one could find quite a bit in here – surfaces and solutions – vaguely related to Brexit. The bunch cunningly elected in GUILLOTINE to expedite the bill that will make us SECEDE, CLEAVE and SEPARATE from the other REGIONS of the EU, the ensuing RED TAPE causing trade to CHOKE. All presided over by the PRAT who doesn’t use a COMB. Even the surface for RHONE seems to want to play a part. But that’s all coincidence.

   Thanks Brendan and Andrew

8. I took 26a NOVEMBER to be as Toadfather@4: ‘V’ (very) inside NO EMBER (nothing remaining from fire).

9. Agree with Penfold@3 re the parsing of OCTUPLET (nice clue). I only know FORTEPIANO as the old musical instrument (which is probably why Chambers has it as one word) and couldn’t parse this as I didn’t spot the anagram. I wondered about ANTIMATTER being ephemeral, but being no scientist I’ll leave it to those better qualified to explain.

   Favourites DRAMATIS PERSONAE, BOTTOMLESS and COMB.

10. Yes, a clever puzzle and lots of fun, particularly OCTUPLET and GUILLOTINE (LOI for me), plus DRAMATIS PERSONAE. I was too sloppy in initially writing Persona in 19d instead of Personae in 16d, which held things up somewhat. Many thanks to Brendan and Andrew.

11. The grass would’ve been a bung-and-pray, part for area being a bit vague, but with the ‘part’ theme it had to be. And so yes, pretty smooth from Brendan. And yep, mrpenny, November downeres pretty warmish, but I forgave the partly for secede for the sake of the theme and surface [and it’s a bit of a recurring WA joke; mind you the local Tories, guillotined on Saturday to 2 or 3 seats out of 60, might be wishing it were true]. Part/prat/rapt was neat, as was the repairman tossing out the parts list, and I didn’t mind the GO bits in reins. Lots of fun, ta B and A.

12. PostMark @7 – Well spotted re Brexit theme and the combless prat!

13. Agree with others above re No v ember and oct up let [terrible thought…raising three separate one was enough!]

14. … three separate oneS..

15. Don’t understand why people are repeating what Andrew already said (in shorthand) for 26ac. PostMark@7 I love your alternative theme. We could add fighting like cats…
    Thanks for the fun, Andrew and Brendan.

16. TB @15: thanks 😀 I think people are commenting because Andrew’s blog for 26ac, as it currently stands, is wrong. It doesn’t account for the N and there’s no need to parse O as zero.

17. Nice chewy Tuesday. Thanks s&b.

18. Thanks TerriBlislow, but I have to plead guilty to a mistake in my explanation of 26a.

    Thanks also to Penfold for the definition of OCTUPLET. I’ll correct the blog in both cases.

19. Great stuff, as usual from Brendan.

    My favourites were OCTUPLET, GUILLOTINE, NOVEMBER, DRAMATIS PERSONAE and BOTTOMLESS.
    I interpreted SECEDE as Lord Jim @5 did.

    Many thanks to Brendan and Andrew (and PostMark 😉 )

20. A lovely puzzle, even though I missed both the theme Brendan intended and the mini-theme the eagle-eyed PostMark @7 identified (brightening my morning considerably). And of course, there’s even a nod to the unCOMBed PRAT’s predecessor, who famously claimed to be Strong and STABLE, though the ‘Rong and Sta le’ which remained after letters fell off always seemed nearer the mark.
    I love the economy of 5, 16; and I thought OCTUPLET was especially clever.
    Thank you, Brendan; and thank you Andrew, in particular for addressing the one mild concern I had, which was whether “starting to be” in 9A was redundant.

21. [gif @13 Yes, somethings are meant to come in eights, like bits in a byte, furlongs in a mile, bottles in a Methuselah, legs on a spider, English kings named Edward or Henry, but not babies. I suppose you’d just have to hope that they could sing.

    +1 for PostMark’s clever weaving of the answers into the combless prat’s Brexit theme.]

22. Fun and nice mini-theme. Not as fast as yesterday but do-able with some gorgeous surfaces.

    BOTTOMLESS (which is what I definitely am not after months of lockdown) was a chuckle.

    Thanks to Brendan and Andrew!

23. Always a delight to have a Brendan to solve. Possibly too many clever clues to count: OCTUPLET and HENRY THE FOURTH were stand-out for me, but you have to admire the gentle application of easier clues where required – without CATS, COMB might have been unsolvable, and three manageable anagrams give us a fighting chance at getting ESPARTO.

    Bis!

24. Another clever and enjoyable crossword from Brendan – I do wish he’d appear more often

    Thanks to him and Andrew

25. Always pleased to see Brendan and this was as clever as ever. All the top clues already mentioned but I thought the puzzle was a bit humourless. Therefore I really enjoyed your flight of fancy PostMark and perhaps continuing the Shakespearean theme, your prat could also be described as a bit of a cock’s COMB.

    Ta Brendan & Brendan

26. [A hearty commendation of Bluth’s puzzle in today’s Independent to anyone who has the appetite for another. Very clever.]

27. So good I named him twice! Thanks Andrew

28. Thank you Andrew especially for the cultural enlightenment re Callas, Henry IV and PIANOFORTE (so nearly fell into that backwards part!) – and for responding to the blog suggestions above, with which I concur – OCTUPLETS in particular took me a long time to see though GUILLOTINE was last and needed your explanation of definition to fully understand. But this was a smile throughout in appreciation of both piecewise and overall ingenuity. Enjoyed a lightbulb moment with COMB (especially as I saw it before CATS), the nod to local financial scrutability, the big issue and the unfathomable – but my favourite because it is a new word, clued fairly where the “missing part” was key, is ESPARTO, thanks Brendan.

29. How enjoyable this was. I loved Postmark@7’s Brexit theme, especially the reference to Boris. From my memories of Latin, DRAMATIS PERSONAE seems to be female but surely the casts were predominantly male? Thanks to Brendan and Andrew

30. A bit of a curate’s egg? Or less than the sum of its parts? I’ll shut my trap now
    [TOSCA are my most listened artist according to Roon – 4 hours 47 minutes in the last 4 weeks. Apparently]

31. Good setting to find so many parts.

    The point that Lord Jim @5 made regarding ‘partly withdraw’ is supported by the Chambers definition of SECEDE: ‘To withdraw, esp from a party’

    I liked the OCTUPLET, REGIONS and the concise RAPT.

    Thanks to Brendan and Andrew (and no thanks to PM for reminding me about Brexit) 😉 .

32. [An equally hearty seconding of PostMark’s recommendation @26 of Bluth’s Indy puzzle.]

33. Julia@29: Ah, but grammatical gender is not necessarily aligned with biological sex. Das Mädchen (neuter gender) for a “girl” (feminine sex) in German, for example.

    I really enjoyed this clever puzzle and its double theme. Standout clue was the cryptic Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), for the way it dovetailed the two themes so neatly.

34. Yes, a very enjoyable puzzle, very clever.

    I was a bit puzzled by the “to be raised” part of 14a. OCTUPLETs hit the news as babies, but we all start that way, don’t we?

35. I loved this-always like Brendan
    Just one thing bothering me
    Where was Arvo?

36. Julia @29 “Persona” is a feminine noun in Latin (as it is in French, the source of the English word).

    Enjoyable puzzle, thanks, Brendan, and thanks Andrew for the blog. I especially liked DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

37. Great puzzle. Brendan can ring the changes on a theme like nobody else.

    Bittersweet, though, with all those reminders of theatre, dark for a year now.

38. [copmus @35 Playing darts with John?]

39. Another one where I started off well on the top half and then ground to a halt. And then when with some help from the dictionaries etc I worked out most of the rest I couldn’t see why I hadn’t got them in the first place.

    I didn’t parse REGIONS, RED TAPE, GUILLOTINE – all of which I really liked once they were explained.

    And like many others loved PostMark’s alternative theme @7

    Thanks to Brendan and Andrew (I really needed your help today)

40. All was going well until held up by what proved to be SECTION / OCTUPLET. I was so convinced that the latter was the arcane legal term ‘estoppel’ that I performed many mental gyrations, first to make it parse then make sense for 4d. Thankfully Mrs T came here to check and within seconds of being told I was wrong I was starting a word with OCT. Didn’t take long after that!

    [grantinfreo @11, thanks for the heads up on the WA elections. I had no idea they were going on, and they’re several continents away from where I live, but there is so little good news these days that one takes what one can.]

41. Trailman @40: I wish Mrs T could have got that message to me, too. Estoppel came up as recently as the Saturday blog, of course, so it was in the mind and the crossers seemed to be pointing at it as well as the reference to old courts. It distracted me for a while before the pdm.

42. Lovely puzzle. Thanks to Brendan and Andrew. Thanks also to Copmus @35 for bringing to mind another great Part – it’s been too long since I last listened to his music.

43. Was annoyingly thrown by 4d. Got it into my head that the answer was “mention” from definition “say” but could not make any sense of “none”+ M.
    “Cleave” @22d is one of those interesting English words called contranyms which can, depending on context, have completely opposite meanings: to split or to stick to. The verb sanction would be another example.

44. Years ago, saw Arvo here, conducting his work (Requiem? Te Deum?). Quite mesmeric, as I remember.
    [Ta for tuning in, Trailman @40. Just before the previous poll, the then Tory premier, knowing he would lose, bulldozed hectares of remnant bushland near here. Four years later, the beautiful black cockatoos and other birds are still circling the suburbs, looking for food and nesting hollows. Now the remnant Tories don’t even retain minor party status, so even blue ribbon Tory voters were appalled it seems. A small mercy, as you say].

45. … and ditto others in praise of your brilliant ghost Brexit riff, PosMark @11. [Reminds me of one of the few Geniuses I’ve done, one with imaginary books by made-up authors, something like “Endless trailbacks” by Delores R Going-Noware]

46. Lovely puzzle enhanced by postmark’s second theme! I don’t think my double tick clue has been mentioned – RAPT – because it took me ages to see ‘new spell” as the anagrind – I was bewitched! I also tried to shoehorn ESTOPPEL in until I gave up and started from scratch – although it is hard to dislodge ideas once they’ve taken root – a bit like ear worms.
    Thanks to Brendan and Andrew.

47. Great to see Brendan back, thank you for the blog. You are quite right that antimatter is certainly not ephemeral but did not spoil the clue. Anti neutrinos pass through the Earth continuously , countless millions every second.

48. [Roz: after the discussion last week about the slightly dated use of “character” to mean character reference, last night I came across this in The Sign of Four. In chapter 7 Holmes is talking about the Sholto household and says, “There is this butler, Lal Rao, whom we have not seen. Mrs Bernstone gives him far from a good character.” Interesting how so often when some usage comes up in a crossword, you then keep seeing examples of it. (Though maybe not so much with “jorum”…)]

49. ( That is another really good spot Lord Jim @ 48. I think it must have been common usage up until the first world war and then perhaps died out. If you come across Spooner’s Catflap anytime in the comments he was keen to find out the Conrad reference. )

50. Never saw a theme, so nothing new there.
    As seems to happen so often, I raced through 60% of it in about half an hour then hit the wall and no amount of staring at it got me any further. Once the wordplay is beyond me, that’s it, no more. Still 60% represents success for me, a few more years and I might get to 65%.
    Enjoyed Brendan’s crossword used to enjoy his offerings in the Telegraph years ago.
    Thanks Andrew fornthe hints.

51. Came to this late because of the alternative spelling of CLEAVE as in Cleeve Hill and the equine happenings at the Cheltenham Festival below there this afternoon. Strictly a DNF as I struggled to see GUILLOTINE and therefore the intersecting REGIONS. Took me a while to spot the excellent OCTUPLET….

52. This took longer than all of yesterday’s Monday puzzles. There comes a time when my delight in finally getting an answer is outweighed by my shame in not getting it earlier (HENRY THE FOURTH) or having to use a worfinder (GUILLOTINE). Still great puzzle, blog and comments. Thanks, all.

53. This took me a while today, but was well worth the effort. As Hoofit said above, it took me back to Sundays of old in the ‘Torygraph’.

54. [Toadfather @ 4 & Toadson @53: I know paired solutions are becoming all the rage but I don’t think I’ve noticed this combo before. Is this a spawning event or yet another coincidence?]

55. Thanks Brendan and Andrew from a happy Goldilocks. Mmmm mm.

56. Brendan be brilliant, again. What amazes me is how he challenges himself to make one theme applicable to every clue, and still manages elegant and funny surfaces, the Swiss banks surface (9a) was my favourite. The one I didn’t get, 2d RAPT (doh!), was another.

    And then he adds a second theme, and provides fodder for PostMark to come up with a third one.

    This was the most fun since the last Brendan.

    [copmus@35, the dynamic Arvo was hiding behind his fortepiano.]

57. I wonder which theme came first? I suspect a proposed theatrical theme generated a lot of potential PARTs, and Brendan decided to make a virtue of necessity.

58. Distracted by the horse racing yesterday and didn’t fully concentrate on this one. Failed on two that I should have got from the PART theme: RAPT and ESPARTO, but failing to see REINS from ‘controlling mechanism’ when you’re watching horses on the box is pretty dim, and I couldn’t follow the ‘bit by bit, GO’ instruction either.

    I think the idea of ANTIMATTER being ephemeral comes from this: “High-energy cosmic rays impacting Earth’s atmosphere (or any other matter in the Solar System) produce minute quantities of antiparticles in the resulting particle jets, which are immediately annihilated by contact with nearby matter.”

59. PostMark @54 – This was the first I’d seen of Toadfather – I don’t think it is my Grandfather speaking from ‘the other side’ ….

60. As a physicist, I’ll give a seal of approval to the definition for ANTIMATTER. Although you’re right that antimatter is not intrinsically ephemeral, the Universe is filled with vastly more ordinary matter than antimatter, so when antimatter is created it almost always quickly comes into contact with ordinary matter and ends its existence very quickly.

    Antineutrinos, as Roz @47 rightly points out, are a counterexample. They fly across the Universe for extremely long times without annihilating. But the other, more noticeable, forms of antimatter almost always have short lifetimes. So although describing them as ephemeral is not 100% accurate, I think it’s close enough.

    I found this to be a very enjoyable puzzle. It’s impressive to have worked a theme so thoroughly through the clues without making them seem labored. I failed on ESPARTO, never having heard of this grass, although in hindsight the theme + wordplay should have gotten me there.

    I also didn’t know the definition of GUILLOTINE, but managed to get the clue anyway, and now I know something new about British parliamentary procedure, which will no doubt come in handy.

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