Guardian Cryptic 29,288 by Pangakupu

by

The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/29288.

A late and hurried blog, with one clue 24A CONTE unparsed. Also, I leave it to others to identify the Maori nina (the fourth column looks suspicious). Scads of envelopes.

ACROSS
1 SACKBUT
Wine barrel trimmed to make instrument (7)
A charade of SACK (‘wine’ – as old a term as the instrument) plus BUT[t] (‘barrel’) minus the last letter (‘trimmed’).
5 DERIVED
Daughters interrupted by expression of hesitation I have produced (7)
An envelope (interrupted by’) of ER (‘expression of hesitation’) plus I’V’E (‘I have’) in D D (‘daughters’).
9 REVIEWERS
They criticise struggle to fill water containers beside river (9)
An envelope (‘to fill’) of VIE (‘struggle’) in R (‘river’) plus EWERS (‘water containers’).
10 PARMA
Parents accommodate heading for Rome (Italian city) (5)
An envelope (‘accommodate’) of R (‘heading for Rome’) in PA MA (‘parents’);
11 BURR
Chilled response about source of unusual accent (4)
An envelope (‘about’) of U (‘source of Unusual’) in BRR (‘chilled response’).
12 BLUE MOVIES
Love – i.e., bums heaving – in these? (4,6)
An anagram (‘heaving’) of ‘love ie bums’, with an extended definition.
14 SPINET
Prepared to come round to fix instrument (6)
An envelope (‘to come round’) of PIN (‘to fix’) in SET (‘prepared’ – e.g. set the table).
15 DETROIT
Detective encountering nonsense about one US city (7)
A charade of DET (‘detective’) plus (‘encountering’) ROIT, an envelope (‘about’) of I (‘one’) in ROT (‘nonsense’).
16 MAWKISH
Week One in US series is sentimental (7)
An envelope (‘in’) of WK (‘week’) plus I (‘one’) in MASH (‘US series’, television).
18 NOUGHT
Nothing new purchased, having missed opening (6)
A charade of N (‘new’) plus [b]OUGHT (‘purchased’) minus the first letter (‘having missed opening’).
20 RIDING CROP
Yorkshire produce an encouragement for Arab? (6,4)
A charade of RIDING (one third of ‘Yorkshire’) plus CROP (‘produce’); the ‘Arab’ is a horse.
21 INNS
Much-favoured bridge team where lawyers gather (4)
A charade of IN (‘much favoured’) plus NS (north and south, ‘bridge team’).
24 CONTE
Short story identifying detective, in brief? (5)
I am at a loss here: the ‘detective in brief’ could be ‘TE[c], but CON for ‘identifying’? I do not know of any detective starting CONTE, so it is over to you.

Thanks DuncT @7. It is C ON TE, giving ‘TEC.
25 ENDEAVOUR
Little space to be engrossed in accommodating a venture (9)
A charade of EN (‘little space’) plus DEAVOUR, an envelope (‘accommodating’) of ‘a’ in DEVOUR (‘to be engrossed in’ – particularly of reading matter).
26 OEDIPUS
Dictionary is holding up returning name of complex (7)
A charade of OED (Oxford English ‘Dictionary’) plus IPUS, an envelope (‘holding’) of PU, a reversal (‘returning’) of ‘up’ in ‘is’.
27 ROLL-TOP
List best type of desks? (4-3)
A charade of ROLL (‘list’) plus BEST (‘top’, verb).
DOWN
1 SCRUB
Cancel membership fee after receiving credit (5)
An envelope (‘after receiving’) of CR (‘credit’) in SUB (‘membership fee’).
2 COVER UP
Conceal part of innings in tournament (5,2)
An envelope (‘in’) of OVER (‘part of innings’ -but an innings may not last an over) in CUP (‘tournament’).
3 BEER
Runs after people gathering for a drink (4)
A charade of BEE (‘people gathering’) plus R (‘runs’).
4 THE PLOT THICKENS
Somehow pitches tent OK, securing height and length? Things become more complex (3,4,8)
An anagram (‘somehow’) of ‘pitches tent OK’ plus H (‘height’) and L (‘length’).
5 DESCENDING ORDER
Monks heading for Hell, largest first? (10,5)
Definition and literal interpretation.
6 RAPPORTEUR
Left in charge over European committee appointment (10)
An envelope (‘over’) of PORT (‘left’) in RAP (‘charge’) plus EUR (‘European’).
7 VERTIGO
Check I leave after taking in conclusion of another Hitchcock film (7)
A charade of VERT, an envelope (‘taking in’) of R (‘conclusion of anotheR‘) in VET (‘check’); plus I GO (‘I leave’), with ‘after’ indicating the order of the particles.
8 DEAD SET
Determined a Duke should be borne by galloping steed (4,3)
An envelope (‘should be borne by’) of ‘a’ plus D (‘Duke’) in DESET, an anagram (‘galloping’) of ‘steed’.
13 INDIAN HEMP
Source of drugs, I note, given to male politician (6,4)
A charade of INDIA (‘I’) plus N (‘note’) plus HE (‘male’) plus MP (‘politician’).
16 MOROCCO
Leather companies taking different directions after excess trimmed (7)
A charade of MOR[e] (‘excess’) minus its last letter (‘trimmed’) plus OC CO (‘companies taking different directions’).
17 WIDENED
Welsh papers stop including English spread (7)
An envelope (‘including’) of E ‘English’) in W (‘Welsh’) plus ID (‘papers’) plus END (‘stop’).
19 HANG OUT
Display hospital article on inflammatory disease (4,3)
A charade of H (‘hospital’) plus AN (indefinite ‘article’) plus GOUT (‘inflammatory disease’).
22 SYRUP
Second year completed? Sweet (5)
A charade of S (‘second’) plus YR (‘year’) plus UP (‘completed’).
23 HALL
College had reduced students (4)
A charade of ‘ha[d]’ minus its last letter (‘reduced’) plus L L (‘students’).

picture of the completed grid

101 comments on “Guardian Cryptic 29,288 by Pangakupu”

  2. That was the most purely enjoyable crossword I have encountered in quite a while. The vast majority of clues were worked out piecemeal from the wordplay with very few filled in first and parsed afterwards. Especially pleased to have got the instruments that I have never heard of, SPINET and SACKBUT. Also praise for REVIEWERS, NOUGHT, and CONTE, my LOI. When I first saw Pangakupu a while ago (during Covid times I think) I struggled with the wordy clues, but the last couple of puzzles have seen much more succinct clueing, and this one was nigh on perfect imho. Thanks Pangakupu and PeterO

  5. Fairly whooshed through this, unusual for me when sparring with this setter. At the very last had to look up RAPPORTEUR once it was in, and also the rather bunged in CONTE, as the only one of those I’ve ever come across before was attached to Antonio, football manager and adversary of Thomas Tuchel in the past. Wondered why BEER should be the answer to 3d, until I remembered the Spelling Bee we endured from time to time at school, though I’d always somehow imagined it was represented as Spelling B…

  6. There’s a detective thing going on here, isn’t there?

    I spent as much time on 6d as the rest of the puzzle!

    Thanks Pangakupu and PeterO

  9. Weird. Essentially a write-in, which (for me) is unheard-of for this compiler. But then one comes to 24, which is incomprehensible. So thanks, I suppose, to Pangakupu, and to PeterO, not least for sharing my bewilderment.

  10. I enjoyed this. RH side was easier and the LHS was quite tough for me.

    Favourites: DESCENDING ORDER, HALL, OEDIPUS, REVIEWERS.

    I did not parse 1ac, 24ac, 13d apart from HE+MP.

    Thanks, both.

    Note: I never heard of TEC = detective. Clever clue C on TE

  12. I read 24ac as “con” = scan/observe – maybe even study – and “te” as short for tec – abbreviation for detective. Anyone else? (Just seen DuncT@7 – I’m a slow typist. Welldone Dunc)

  14. crispy@4 I took it to mean con (to study something closely e.g. she conned his face) and te as short for tec = detective. Happy to hear other thoughts as I am now less convinced than I was!
    ah – I see I am not alone (thanks for the edit function)

  15. Best P…u puzzle to date for me

    Top ticks for the hell-bound monks, RIDING CROP, and MOROCCO

    SPINET and INDIAN HEMP took me longer than the rest combined

    Cheers P&P

  16. michelle@10. Thank you, that must be it for CONTE. I was disadvantaged by not knowing about the Eliot Conte novels, but even had I been aware of them I don’t think I’d have spotted the C on TE device.

  18. To date I have not had much success with this setter but today (like others) I was much more on the wavelength especially in the top half.

    Favourites included: DERIVED, OEDIPUS, REVIEWERS, BURR, RAPPORTEUR

    Thanks Pangakupu and PeterO

  21. Nicely put together puzzle.

    LOI was, of course, CONTE – difficult parsing for a difficult word but I think DuncT @7 nailed it. I liked the extended definition for BLUE MOVIES, the good cd/d for DESCENDING ORDER, and, as usual, I got poleaxed by the I for INDIAN in 13.

    Thanks Pan and PeterO.

  22. Tec was a common abbreviation for detective when I was in the Met. I wonder if T. Gregg knew he had also played KIRIKITI. This was a lot of fun and on the gentler side for the setter. I chuckled at BLUE MOVIES and DESCENDING ORDER. Having solved ENDEAVOUR, I thought the detective alongside might have been Morse but I couldn’t justify short story as Morse(l). Guessed CONTE and wondered if Antonio had played for or managed the diagonally opposite clue, PARMA, but it seems he consistently beat them. Nice workout.

    Ta Pangakupu & PeterO.

  24. Hi Charles @16 – I can’t take credit for parsing CONTE. I was commenting on what DuncT had written at post #7 which makes sense to me now that I have learnt that TEC = detective

  25. In the wordplay for ENDEAVOUR the use of “to be engrossed in” to equate to “devour” is really wonky: to devour something is to eat it hungrily and by metaphorical extension one can be said to devour a book if one reads it eagerly. But the semantics of “devour” are that the devourer consumes the thing devoured — while the semantics of “being engrossed in” is quite the opposite: the thing that engrosses consumes the person engrossed.

  26. I’m another who couldn’t parse CONTE – I was only able to write it in because I can speak some French – perhaps Panga could have been a bit more charitable and written “French short story…”? The wordplay, now I’ve seen the explanation, is very clever, very Grauniad-ish, but perhaps not the best choice for such an obscure word?

    Rest of the puzzle is fine, I’ve put ticks against OEDIPUS (though maybe ‘Complex’ could have come at the front?), MOROCCO, SYRUP, BLUE MOVIES, and the two historic musical instruments SACKBUT and SPINET (mini-theme here? I guess not).

    I was a bit bemused to see RIDING CROP defined as an ‘encouragement’ – since it seems to be an instrument designed to inflict pain on the poor animal. Ah well, perhaps it’s ‘encouragement’ in the sense of ‘pour encourager les autres’? Or am I being too dismissive of the equestrian fraternity?

    With Pangakupu, I know I’ve a good chance of enlarging my knowledge of Maori words, although I had to guess at “kirikiti”. Clearly a ‘loan’ word! I didn’t spot any other candidates.

    Thanks to the two P’s: Panga and Peter…

  27. Thanks Pangakupu and PeterO
    Lots of question marks for me. I was happy with tec for detective, but less so with DET in 15a. BEE for gathering of people? Only in very specialised references. Display for HANG OUT?
    I liked the DESCENDING ORDER and OEDIPUS.
    I wonder how many of us knew MOROCCO was leather from “The road to Morocco”, in which Hope and Crosby were “like Webster’s dictionary”?

  28. Most of this was a pleasant diversion for an hour or so in the middle of the night when I couldn’t get back to sleep. Didn’t manage to parse 13d, and having read PeterO’s blog I am kicking myself.
    I am sort of glad that I am not alone with 24a. I feel that if a setter includes an obscure word (which may be forced on the setter by the grid, though here the crossers would have allowed CANOE, CAN WE, CENSE and CONGÉ) the wordplay ought to be very clear. Here we have a deliberately obscure word coupled with wordplay which verges on the too-clever-by-half. I don’t think that’s fair on the solver.
    Apart from which, thanks to P and P.

  29. I blazed through 3/4 of this puzzle remarkably quickly, only to come to a crashing halt in the SW. I had to cheat (looking at the possibilities in Chambers Word Wizard) on 24ac (CONTE) and 13dn (INDIAN HEMP). Even after seeing the answers, I still couldn’t parse either before coming here.

    In hindsight, I really should have parsed 13dn. This is a trick that frequently gets me: if India appeared in a clue, I would immediately think I, but the other way around doesn’t occur to me. I don’t feel bad about failing to parse 24ac, though, especially as I’m clearly in good company.

  30. I only found CONTE because I know enough French to get its meaning in that language: couldn’t parse that or ENDEAVOUR, but I got on better than I usually do with Pangakupu and enjoyed DESCENDING ORDER and RIDING CROP. Discovered I don’t know what a RAPPORTEUR is.

  32. Pleasant puzzle. Polynesian Ninas are completely outside my competence, so I don’t even bother to look for them. But I guess P painted himself into a corner with this one, hence CONTE. This was my LOI and unparsed, but I recognised it as a French word (not Italian, which would be ‘racconto’) although I was unaware of its English usage.

    Having solved SACKBUT and SPINET early on, I looked in vain for shawms and crumhorns…

    Thanks to S&B

  33. Thank you PeterO and Pangakupu. This was a fun puzzle, mostly very straightforward, but I also fell over on CONTE, although I worked out what that had to be and checked it along with RAPPORTEUR,

    I knew MOROCCO as leather from Morocco bound books and Morocco tobacco pouches, from my extensive reading when I was younger, – probably from Victorian books.

    Spelling Bees and Sewing Bees aren’t uncommon, including the Great British Sewing Bee, so BEER made sense when I had the crossers.

  34. As PeterO says, “Scads of envelopes” and a plethora of containment indicators…

    In x3
    About x2
    Accommodate
    Accommodating
    Interrupted by
    To fill
    Round
    Taking in
    Holding
    Including
    Receiving
    Securing
    Borne by

  35. Can anybody explain how LL is “student” in 23D? Apparently I am the only one struggling with that so I assume it is otherwise widely known! I am familiar with LL.B for Bachelor of Law, but not LL by itself.

  37. Jacob @35
    This is indeed a crossword staple. L is the plate identifying a learner driver, and hence student. L L is two of ’em.

  38. muffin @27: Detective would typically be shortened to Det Con/Sgt/Insp etc but I take your point that it doesn’t look quite right.

  39. Shanne @33: As Bing Crosby and Bob Hope sang in one of those ‘Road to..’ movies with Dorothy Lamour: ‘Just like Webster’s Dictionary we’re Morocco bound’.

  40. Game of 2 halves for me today. The RHS went in fairly quickly but the LHS was a struggle. I did manage to find out that Conte was a short story but I’d never heard of it and couldn’t parse it. 5 dn was a laugh and my favourite today. Thanks Panga and PeterO.

  41. Arklark@6: yes, I’d say a detective theme. I’ve probably missed some, but “THE PLOT THICKENS” (Holmes staple quote), ENDEAVOUR, and BURR (played Perry Mason on TV seem to be too much of a coincidence. I’ve never heard of the Eliot Conte detective series.

  42. CONTE is a French word meaning short story, tale etc, so I solved it from the definition. I parsed it as ‘on’ ( identifying) and ‘tec’ (short for detective), combined to make CONTE. But I think DuncT@7 provides a much more elegant explanation with C on TE.
    Bee is a generic term, commonly used for working bees, sewing bees etc. Maybe others have said this already.
    Lovely puzzle. I enjoyed DESCENDING ORDER, THE PLOT THICKENS, BURR, BLUE MOVIES, OEDIPUS.
    Thanks Pangakupu and Peter O.

  44. Enjoyed this far more than usual for Pangakupu, except for CONTE. Is a French fairy tale or nursery rhyme equivalent to a short story? And the explanations are tortuous In my opinion. However, lots to smile at.

  46. About 2/3 of the way through I thought I’d take a look and see if anything nina-ish was emerging, and saw NE-U in the next-to-last row. NELU sounded like it might be a Maori word (it seems it means buried, quite appropriate) so that gave me an L for HALL. So quite wrong in the logic, but it gave me an answer. Weird!

  48. Gavin@47 Chambers has for “bee”…
    “A gathering of persons to unite their labour for the benefit of one individual or family, or for some joint amusement, exercise or competition (as in quilting bee, spelling bee)”

  50. I had trouble with the SW corner, where there were six words I didn’t get last night. A bit of check button got me through.

    Thanks to Pangakapu and PeterO.

  51. Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann is my only referent for CONTE. But that’s undigested French. Has anyone ever seen it in the wild in English? I agree with the sentiment that the Frenchness should have been indicated somehow, or else there should have been clearer wordplay. Anyway, that was my only failure here.

    SPINET always calls to mind, for me, this song, here performed by Muppets.

  52. I checked the rest of the puzzle was right – not being entirely certain of BEER or HALL – then put in an unparsed CONTE (something to do with CON+TE{c}). I’m used to Pangakapu in his other guises as being hard to parse, but that was especially difficult!

    Thanks Pangakapu and PeterO.

  53. After a 2 or 3 year hiatus from attempting The Guardian cryptics I thought I had done rather well the past few days, alas today was above my pay grade.

  54. KateE @ 44 – I have several volumes of contes by Maupassant, my favourite French writer; and by a nice coincidence I am currently reading “contes du lundi” by Alphonse Daudet. I’d recommend both writers to anyone who hasn’t yet come across them. (And I didn’t parse 24 across either!)

  55. The plot of OEDIPUS Rex is a detective story. Who killed Laius? Spoiler alert – the murderer turns out to be…
    OEDipus schmOEDipus. What does it matter, as long as he loves his mother?

  56. All very enjoyable – and not a write-in! The RHS went in more easily then the left (as it did for Michelle @10 and JerryG @40). I liked the clues to the two long answers best, along with those for OEDIPUS and BLUE MOVIES.

    Thanks to Pangakupu and PeterO.

  57. loi – CONTE – knew the word from Éric Rohmer’s Six contes moraux – but couldn’t parse it. Usually the sign of a good clue…
    Thought it might be ON TEC with “cycling” missing from the clue. But C ON TE => TEC – it beat me, so I didn’t like it.
    Thanks P&PO

  58. I enjoyed this puzzle although had trouble starting it and finishing it. Favourite was DESCENDING ORDER.
    LOI was CONTE. Since it was the only thing I could think of to fit the clue I asked Google and this came up from Wikipedia.
    Conte (pronounced [k??t]) is a literary genre of tales, often short, characterized by fantasy or wit.
    I thought the setter might have done the same in order to find an explanation for the only word that would fit the space.
    Sorry – Just read all the comments and see that some of us do know the word.

  59. I loved the long down clues – the long anagram for THE PLOT THICKENS and the monks on their way to hell. Otherwise, as PeterO said there were “scads of envelopes”, which are the type of clue that I do not really enjoy in overabundance. Despite that, I appreciated that almost all the clues had wonderful surfaces, no matter how fiddly the answer.

    Thanks to the setter and to PeterO

  60. Jay thanks! I’ve heard spelling bee for years (British but I live in America) — but never really thought about what “bee” meant in that phrase. So there you go. The OED has it as “Originally US” — and many of the examples seem to be American, although there’s one from Australia. First entry is 1769, from the Boston Gazette: “Last Thursday about Twenty young Ladies met at the house of Mr. Nehemiah Liscombe, here, on purpose for a Spinning Match; (or what is call’d in the Country a Bee.”

  61. I liked this puzzle, though it was a bizarre experience for me in that 25 of the solutions were write ins (or near enough) but it ended up being a DNF as I couldn’t get either SPINET or CONTE as this puzzle was my first ever encounter with both words. I suppose both of these clues are examples of the dreaded “complex parsing x obscure word”, but that’s supposed to be part of the challenge isn’t it? Anyway, I had smiles for DESCENDING ORDER, OEDIPUS, BURR and ROLL-TOP, and no clunkers either.

  62. JerryG @40 – Same as me RHS a breeze, could not do the LHS at all. Too many words unknown to me and I rarely solve clues from the wordplay.

  63. Thanks for the blog, neat and tidy clues , MOROCCO was clever, CONTE obscure for me but the wordplay was clear .
    Muffin@27 we can HANG OUT / display the flags.

  64. Does anyone else use Arabian instead of Arab to refer to a classical thoroughbred — as in the Darley Arabian?

  65. Solving was a bit easier than parsing and, like many others, I didn’t sort out how the clue for ‘conte’ worked, although the solution was pretty obvious from the crossers.

  67. pserve_p2@25,
    I agree re: the DEVOUR/BE ENGROSSED IN problem. Not the same.
    Fun puzzle. Same problem as others in the SW. Liked the detective mini-theme. VERTIGO probably should be included as a mystery genre movie.
    Thanks , Panga & Peter

  68. I solved 12a, and nothing else. I found this ridiculously difficult.

    What does RIDING have to do with Yorkshire?

    Never heard of 1a.

    I realised D + D was needed in 5a but goosed after that.

    In 25a, what does EN mean?

    Not enough space for all my other questions.

  69. AndrewTyndall@64 Coincidentally the book I’m currently reading is called Horse and it’s about the history of the Darley Arabian.

  70. Steffen @68

    The old County of Yorkshire had three divisions called Ridings (North, East and South).

    An ‘en’ in printer’s parlance is a width measurement equal to that of the letter ‘n’ in the same typeface. An ‘en’ space is a space of that width between words. An ’em’ is similarly based on ‘m’. Both ’em’ and ‘en’ are not uncommon in cryptic crosswords, I feel.

  72. Thanks to S&B. Most of this went in smoothly enough but I couldn’t parse 24a, and went down a rabbit hole with 23d – C(ollege) hAd LL. D’oh!

  73. So, Roz@63 found the wordplay for CONTE clear. Alone, amongst all the commenters. Hmm. A DNF for me (guess which one I failed on). However, I have taken part in lots of working bees, so that didn’t faze me. Thanks, Pangakupu and PeterO.

  74. Posty@71; a few of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges are called “Hall” – eg Trinity Hall (not to be confused with Trinity College!), St Edmund’s Hall. So I suspect the definition is in dictionaries.

  75. Steffen @68, for 1a, the SACKBUT is in some of the early Bible translations as a musical instrument, although it doesn’t date back to Biblical times. It’s an early version of a trombone, is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, (which is about the same time that those early English translations of the Bible were written) and has been played in some folk music (Martin Carthy and John Kirkpatrick getting into traditional sounds) and early music consorts. I’ve seen it played at Shakespeare’s Globe, but I’ve seen a few of their original pronunciation/costume/all male productions. It also regularly turns up in crosswords.

  77. Thank you to Pangakupu for a most enjoyable exercise. Reading the blog today has been helpful and interesting too; thanks to PeterO and other contributors. Favourite 5d DESCENDING ORDER, but I had quite a few other ticks, as well as two unparsed at 24a, the much-discussed CONTE, and 6d RAPPORTEUR (unfamiliar).

  80. Hawa@79. ”working bee” was my reading too of the people gathering in BEER. But I see Collins online has that as Australian and NZ. Perhaps that’s why it was a Pangakupu clue and you and I got it?

  81. Posty@ 71 Lady Margaret HALL has the finest gardens in Oxford and you can swim in the Isis.
    TassieTim @73 C ON TE tells us exactly what to do and rather simple. Azed does this sort of thing all the time , any words containing IS or AS or AND etc .

  83. AlanB @70. The Ridings were North, East and WEST. South Yorkshire came into existence in 1974, the same year that “they” created Humberside – a term never used by those of us who hail from that neck of the woods.

  84. Crispy @83
    Thanks for that correction. Embarrassingly, I knew the Ridings were North, East and West – I was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire!

  86. Thanks PeterO, and DuncT for the CONTE – I had to cheat and look it up, and my best guess at parsing was as per TerriBlislow@12. Elsewhere I think we have seen a “cryptically” before the question mark to indicate that some sort of reverse engineering was required, but I probably wouldn’t have got it anyway, and it’s certainly no complaint as the clue is fair, just beyond my GK and analytical skill. (I am going to make myself feel better by saying that the other clues were smooth enough solves that my brain wasn’t sufficiently revved up for the challenge!) Regarding HALL = College, I think we used to say “I’m dining in hall tonight” when appropriate, even though the institution was not named anything Hall. Like others I found this flowed more naturally than some previous Pangakupu puzzles, wondered why the plural “desks” in 27ac, but loved the BLUE MOVIES and more, thanks Pangakupu.

  87. Gazzh@86. I didn’t have a problem with type of desks in ROLL-TOP. I was wondering why the question mark. Maybe it’s something you’re on to, but I may have missed.

  88. Gregfromoz @76: your comment reminded me of Voltaire’s “pour encourager les autres”, (from Candide, ou l’Optimisme ), with reference to the execution of Admiral John Byng.

  89. paddymelon@87 yes good point, now you mention it – that qn mark appears superfluous.

    I also wondered how long it took people to think of MASH as the US series – quite venerable now, I dimly recall its nth re-run in the 80s. A coincidence I’m sure but MASH (the film, not the TV show) premiered on 25 Jan 1970!

  91. South RIDING – ‘…was adapted for television by Stan Barstow for Yorkshire Television in 1974, starring Hermione Baddeley as Mrs Beddows, Dorothy Tutin as Sarah Burton, Nigel Davenport as Robert Carne and Judi Bowker as Midge Carne. The series won both the BAFTA and the Broadcasting Press Guild awards for Best Drama Series in 1975.’ I’m surprised it doesn’t appear to have its own Wikipedia page, but IMDb does. A golden anniversary.

  93. I solved most of these from the (sometimes very plain) definitions, with the wordplay (mostly) fairly easy to unpick subsequently. CONTE fitted only the first part, though I had to check Chambers to see if it is considered to be a word in English (it is). Larousse has conte: tale, story, with conte de fées for fairy story, which would be how most who knew this word might have come across it.

    I spotted kirikiti but didn’t realise it’s a borrowed word from cricket. Something I learnt today!

    Thanks to Pangakupu and PeterO.

  94. I’m really sorry I don’t understand CONTE at all. I do get the detective in brief = TE(c) but how do you get C and ON from ”identifying”?

  95. Hi QuietEars,
    It’s a backwards reference. To get TEC, you put the ‘C on TE’. You see?

    I’m very late to this party but I didn’t finish. I’ve not heard of CONTE or RAPPONTEUR and I still don’t understand the parsing of the latter.
    It seems to me, the clued ‘over’ is not only superfluous but completely misleading…

  96. Quiet Ears @94
    That is as far as I got in my rushed blog, failing to see the wordplay-in-the-answer bit.
    Drumdin @95
    Looking back at my blog, I see that it should have read “An envelope (‘in’) of PORT (‘left’) in RAP (‘charge’) plus (‘over’, in a down clue) EUR …”. I agree that ‘over’ is superfluous to the wordplay. “Misleading”? What a shocking idea in a cryptic clue!

  97. To defend RAPPORTEUR , it is a DOWN clue so the RAP is OVER the EUR and we need to put in PORT .
    A word now often used in the Guardian for a representative of the UN who often produces a special report on how useless the UK government is.

  98. PeterO, well, yes, you’re right, they wouldn’t be fun if they didn’t do any twisting.

    Roz, thanks for that! I’ve seen the light.
    Those special reports must seem quite commonplace by now.

  99. Thanks Drumdin @95 and Peter O @96
    It still feels rather too obscure for me to have thought of during a crossword- as a beginner (how long is one a beginner for??) not been a year yet for me!

  100. Surely 24A parses as “Continue East” (CONT. + E), which if you do on the grid, you arrive at ENDEAVOUR (Morse, the detective). This fits the “identifying detective in brief“, as both CONT and E are abbreviations. The question mark hints at an unusual parsing, which this certainly is.

  101. As people have said, mostly easy for this setter but I couldn’t get CONTE and thought the chilled response might be the textspeak “brb” and that “burb” was an accent I hadn’t heard of. I’m surprised no one has queried DERIVED. Surely to produce is not to derive? The source produces something, a person derives it from that source.

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