Financial Times 17,370 by PETO

10 comments on “Financial Times 17,370 by PETO”

1. SUPER BOWL
   SUPERB(magnificent) +OWL (winger)

2. The Russian runner and British poet held me up but I did remember the English river and RE. Didn’t like H for Harry in 7d.

   Thanks Peto & Cineraria.

3. Geoff@2 7D H is a standard abbreviation for “henry” – it’s the SI unit of inductance – and capitalisation (to “Henry”) is fair game in cryptic crosswords.

4. I also had a question mark against the definition for 1a.

   I don’t think I’ve seen the clue for 1d before 🙂

5. 17d held me up for quite a bit. I felt it had to be SUPER BOWL but I had it in my head that “magnificent” just clued SUPER without the “B”. Took a while for the penny to drop.

   I liked 4a, perhaps because I was fortunate enough to have been able to do a half day skiing last week, and 11a.

   Quite a scary grid I thought with 4 clues that had more blanks than crossing letters (16,20,9,23).

   Couldn’t parse the philosopher (to my shame as it was part of my degree!) so thanks to Cineraria for that.

6. I was confident I’d be seeing the “Well done!” message with the green tick after I put in the last letter, only to be met with the “You’ve made a boo-boo” (or similar) one instead. I couldn’t see where I’d slipped up, so I went through all the answers and found 20a was incorrect. I’d put in VENTURE, parsing the clue as: ‘Exploit’ (=def) URE (‘river’) VENT (‘mouth perhaps’), or cryptically VENT URE = ‘river mouth perhaps’. OK, the word order isn’t quite right, but otherwise it’s pretty close. Still, the computer says no I suppose.

   Appropriately enough, CHESTNUT went in early. In a perverse way, it was disappointing that there weren’t too many examples of the genre, with ERIC for ‘Morecambe’ at 11a being an obvious one. I wondered about 1a too, but Collins gives the first sense of CRAVEN as “cowardly; mean-spirited”. I liked the SUPERB OWL.

   Thanks to Peto and Cineraria

7. Thanks Peto and Cineraria

   7dn: I thought this was a really well written clue. Peto is not resorting to the notion of “fair game in crosswords” mentioned by Rudolf@3: the capitalisation of “henry” has been achieved by putting the word at the beginning of the clue.

   24ac: I was less happy with this one. I can accept “Kind of” = “Sort of”, but the sense of “sort” used here is not the sense that makes it a sound anagram lead.

8. Thanks for the blog, very neat set of clues . I liked the SUPERB OWL ,not an actual bird but htere are several other superb types of bird.

9. All smooth running apart from SW corner where I managed to cause myself all sorts of trouble by coming up with “inserted” for the anagram in 30A.

10. Thanks Peto. This took awhile as I hadn’t heard of a PORTCULLIS or a ROOD SCREEN and SPIN OUT never dropped either — I often miss answers that require knowledge of cricket. I did like the SUPERB OWL as well as CRAVEN, FEATURE, PIMPLE, and VERSE. Thanks Cineraria for the blog.

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