Guardian 29,438 by Fed

by

The puzzle may be found at https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/29438.

That was decidedly difficult – for a while I thought I would have notched up two failures in a row, but the last few finally yielded. Beyond that, I was having all sorts of difficulty formatting the blog.

ACROSS
1 ANGELIC
Divine – like songs of devotion making them come together (7)
A substitution: AN[them]IC (‘like songs of devotion’) with THEM replaced by GEL (‘come together’).
5 GESTALT
Grow to accept self at the outset – key for this type of therapy (7)
A charade of GEST, an envelope (‘to accept’) of S (‘Self at the outset’) in GET (‘grow’ as in get/grow bigger) plus ALT (‘key’ on many computer keyboards), with an extended definition.
9 POWER TOOL
P-perhaps pick jigsaw? (5,4)
A charade of POWER (represented by the initial ‘P’) plus TOOL (‘perhaps pick’).
10 TRIPE
Rubbish effect of drug, ecstasy (5)
A charade of TRIP (‘effect of drug’) plus E (‘ecstasy’).
11 EMIT
Send out Vegemite sandwiches (4)
A hidden answer (‘sandwiched’) in ‘VegEMITe’.
12 ASPERSIONS
Working in operas with bass singers – ultimately, they’re often cast (10)
An anagram (‘working’) of ‘in operas’ plus SS (‘basS singerS ultimately’).
14 DYNAMO
When making a comeback, synth pop act must take on any current producer (6)
A reversal (‘when making a comeback’) of an envelope (‘must take on’) of ‘any’ in OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, ‘synth pop act’).
15 DRYNESS
Reason to moisturise my skin – finally getting into habit (7)
An envelope (‘getting into’) of YN (‘mY skiN finally’) in DRESS (‘habit’).
16 BRIEFED
Prepared cheese – one that sets? (7)
A charade of BRIE (‘cheese’) plus FED (the lad himself, ‘one that sets’).
18 LANDAU
Big character from Leeds United boxing with a coach (6)
An envelope (‘boxing’) of AND (‘with’) plus ‘a’ in L (‘big character from Leeds’) plus U (‘United’).
20 INADEQUACY
In taking just seconds, lawyer advising her client initially to enter dock reveals incompetence (10)
A charade of ‘in’ plus ADE (‘just seconds lAwyer aDvising hEr’) plus QUACY, an envelope (‘to enter’) of C (‘Client initially’) in QUAY (‘dock’).
21 AREA
Group supporting TT race on vacation lining field (4)
An envelope (‘lining’) of RE (‘RacE on vacation’) in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous,’group supporting TT’).
24 CRESS
Leaves old politician out of stuff (5)
A subtraction: C[omp]RESS (‘stuff’) minus O (‘old’) and MP (‘politician’).
25 ZOOKEEPER
One might show pride in their work? (9)
Cryptic definition — the pride being of lions.
25 ENTENTE
Agreement starts in 8, 9 and 10 plus 12 in extremis (7)
Neither clues nor answers referenced: A charade of E N (‘starts in 8, 9’ – Eight Nine’) plus TEN (’10’) plus TE (’12 in extremis’ TwelvE).
27 SPONSOR
13, assuming pawn shop primarily goes with gold for finance (7)
A charade of SPON, an envelope (‘assuming’) of P (‘pawn’, chess notation) in SON (’13’ half nelSON‘) plus S (‘Shop primarily’) plus OR (‘gold’). “finance’ as a verb.
DOWN
1 APPLE
Skin marked with spots – this company make tablets (5)
A subtraction [d]APPLE[d] (‘marked with spots’) minus the outer letters (‘skin’ as an imperative).
2 GAWKILY
Ewoks regularly interrupting happily without co-ordination (7)
An envelope (‘interrupting’) of WK (‘eWoKs regularly’) in GAILY (‘happily’).
3 LARK
Play about singer? (4)
Double definition, the first being the play (actually The Lark in its English title) by Jean Anouilh, about Joan of Arc.
4 CROSSWORD PUZZLE
This angry argument over focus of Freddie Fox (9,6)
A charade of CROSS (‘angry’) plus WOR, a reversal (‘over’) of ROW (‘argument’) plus D (‘focus of freDdie’) plus PUZZLE (‘fox’).
5 GOLDEN DELICIOUS
Did collusion gee up 1 down? (6,9)
An anagram (‘up’) of ‘did collusion gee’.
6 SATISFYING
Enough – it’s broken fine cutting saw (10)
An envelope (‘cutting’) of TIS, an anagram (‘broken’) of ‘its’ plus F (‘fine’) in SAYING (‘saw’).
7 ADIPOSE
Fatty Arbuckle’s coat worn by alkie having taken hem up a little (7)
An envelope (‘worn by’) of DIPOS, which is DIPSO (‘alkie’) with the final letter moved up one (‘taking hem up a little’) in AE (‘ArbucklE‘s coat’). Fatty Arbuckle was a very popular comedian of the silent film era, until his career was cut short by his perceived involvement in a scandal.
8 THEISTS
They have faith in model with hold-up stockings to begin with (7)
A charade of T (‘model’) plus HEIST (‘hold-up’) plus S (‘Stockings to begin with’).
13 HALF NELSON
Drink with famous sailor in hold (4,6)
A charade of HALF (pint, ‘drink’) plus NELSON (Horatio, ‘famous sailor’).
16 BRIOCHE
Maybe roll ball back inspiring finish from Messi with famous Argentine supporting (7)
A charade of BRIO, an envelope (‘inspiring’) of I (‘finish from MessI‘) in BRO, a reversal (‘back’) of ORB (‘ball’); plus CHE (“famous Argentine’).
17 INANEST
Most stupid birds might be found here? (7)
IN A NEST.
19 APROPOS
Truss very upset after a fitting (7)
A charade of ‘a’ plus PROP (‘truss’) plus OS, a reversal (‘upset’ in a down light) of SO (‘very’).
22 AIRER
Rear Admiral essentially struggling to get drier (5)
An anagram (‘struggling’) of ‘rear’ plus I (‘admIral essentially’).
23 HERO
That woman’s love for leading man (4)
A charade of HER (‘that woman’) plus O (‘love’).

88 comments on “Guardian 29,438 by Fed”

  1. Some of these were quite devious, but I did like APROPOS and BRIOCHE. I stayed up till the blog arrived (after 11pm my time) because I just had to see the two wordplays that eluded me, ANGELIC and CRESS. Thank you PeterO and I sympathize with you over your technical difficulties.

    In trying to justify ANGELIC, I found this topological definition: “A regular Hausdorff space is said to be angelic if the closure of each relatively countably compact set A is compact and the closure consists of the limits of sequences in A.” So there!

  2. I generally like this setter, don’t know how I finished this, just went with the flow, guessing answers based on wordplay and definitions…

    Apart from first putting “lionesses” at 25a, based on “o” and “e” from crossers, had no stumbles…

    Thank you PeterO for your early blog, I couldn’t begin to parse a third of these…they were very clever, in retrospect , but beyond me…my sympathies for your tech problems.

    Thank you also to Fed for the puzzle.

  3. Thanks Fed for a masterful crossword. Somehow I managed to complete this but I needed PeterO’s brain to parse ANGELIC, CRESS, APPLE, THEISTS, and BRIOCHE. (Yes, Dr WhatsOn, ‘devious’ is the exact word for these.) I did enjoy this immensely, however, due to clues like GESTALT, TRIPE, ASPERSIONS, LANDAU, and INANEST to mention a few. Thanks PeterO for explaining it all.

  4. Re 3d: I took it not as a reference to the Anouilh work (which I studied for A-level French decades ago), but as the verb ‘lark (about)’ = frolic, be frivolous.

  5. I took LARK as playing about too, not the play. And started with LIONESSES. I couldn’t parse ANGELIC, but I like Fed and can usually work through his clues, so the rest was all good.

    Thank you to PeterO and Fed.

  6. Needed help parsing CRESS and ANGELIC like others so thanks PeterO, and I had play as LARK in the non-drama sense like Flavia @4 and Shanne @5.
    Favourite has to be INANEST.

  7. Parsed 3d LARK as Flavia@4, but OMD (in 14a DYNAMO) had a No. 5 UK hit in 1981 with Joan Of Arc.
    Failed to parse 1a ANGELIC, so that should be COTD.
    Thanks F&PO

  8. Thank P and F! I couldn’t work out many of wordplays – in particular, thanks for the synth pop and angelic explanations. I too decided on LIONESSES at first.

  10. I entered ‘liontamer’ at 25 first, which held me up a bit, wondering what the second word in 4 could be. Then thought that ‘angry argument’ would be ‘cross words’, so the parsing of 4 took some time. Agree with PeterO’s estimation of this puzzle. Some complicated parsing to tease out along the way. Wasn’t sure what OMD was in 14, but assumed it was a synth pop band I hadn’t heard of (I vaguely remember Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark now, though). I’m another who thought LARK was just a synonym for play, though perhaps PeterO is right as the synonym would be ‘lark around’ or ‘lark about’. Thanks to Fed and PeterO.

  11. I didn’t in the end find this too hard, and could parse CRESS, but finding 1a and 9a baffling and bunging 1d in and hoping without understanding the parsing did not bode well in the beginning. Also just bunged in 14a, having never heard of OMD. Thanks Fed and PeterO.

  12. Another here who first plumped for liontamer before HERO made clear that it wasn’t. I also had ‘play about’ = LARK(which Chambers defines as To frolic, play about, have fun (now usu with about)) so the setter does have dictionary support for ‘about’ being included. I needed PeterO’s help for the ANGELIC substitution that I missed and for pointing me to the imperative ‘skin’ in APPLE – I made the ‘dappled’ connection but missed the deletion indication – very clever.

    All in all, a typical Fed: lots of current allusions, humour and cunning constructions – with lots of single letter indications. GAWKILY was my favourite for the amusing surface. Although they worked, I found the two very long clues somewhat … gawky.

    Thanks Fed and PeterO

  13. Chambers Crossword Dictionary has lark as a synonym for play Tomsdad @10 and Postmark @12. We’re having a lark/play?

  14. A while since seeing the old Esalenian Fritz Perls’s therapy method get a mention. Didn’t find this too severe, tho aging brain did take an age to remember that aspersions are cast, and to use the ‘if u try q’ rule while staring dumbly at the crossers for loi inadequacy. Enjoyed it, ta Fed and PeterO.

  15. A bit of a curate’s egg, but a number of very good clues indeed. I especially liked 25a when I realised how it worked: the answer was obvious from the crossers but it took a while to see the conceit of the wordplay.

  17. Absolutely not on Fed’s wavelength today – so many synonyms I couldn’t think of. Found it very heavy going and gave up, using the rest as a reveal-and-learn exercise.

    PS: yes, I thought of Lion Tamer too.

  18. As usual, lots of working backwards from the answer to the parsing. So many solutions would be impossible without crossers, INADEQUACY for example. It’s a peculiarity of Fed puzzles, but I quite like them as something different.

    Thanks both.

  19. Quite a few partial parsings, which led to the answer, and two unparsed, but obviously right. I had parsed CROSS WORD as an angry argument and PUZZLE as fox and was wondering what the middle of the clue was doing.
    Enjoyed the puzzle and thanks for the blog. I am in awe of both bloggers and setters, especially with something like this

  20. I rather revealed my INADEQUACY in trying to solve today’s CROSSWORD PUZZLE. Many of the clues seemed to contain a fiddly, over wordy, slightly unappetizing structure at first reading. And more than a few I failed to parse – APPLE, POWER TOOL, AIRER and AREA. Homing in on the definitions if I could isolate them was the way this morning as I struggled to complete. But of course much to admire along the way. Felt a bit out of my depth at times, however…

  22. Thanks Fed and Peter

    I found this tough going. Sometimes tough is good other times it just feels like too much if a struggle. This time was the latter for me. Fewer smiles than Fed normally provides and more grudging acceptances. Possibly just my mood.

  23. Yet another take on LARK. Still a double definition but I equated the verbal sense of lark with “play about”. Confirmed by Chambers ” lark²…vi to frolic, play about, have fun”

  24. Top ticks for SPONSOR, INADEQUACY & CROSSWORD PUZZLE. Also nice to see OMD making a comeback 🙂

    Cheers F&P

  25. Thanks Fed and PeterO
    Eleven question marks – nearly a record.
    I had LIONTAMER first too, but did think it should be two words.
    I took LARK as “play” as a verb too.
    Favourite CRESS when I saw the parsing.

  26. Some of these clues seemed to be too clever for their own good. By which I mean the answers became plain from a few crossers and word length long before the complications of the clue yielded their tortuous fruit. I kept thinking that there was a tremendous amount of effort to no great effect, like an elephant hiding in a rose bush.

  27. Come on, Michelle @21, life can’t be bad enough for Everyman. Try some of the offerings at mycrossword.co,uk 😉
    I’m glad I wasn’t the only one to opt initially for LIONESSES.
    Some that I couldn’t parse, all of which PeterO convincingly explains. I don’t feel too bad about failing to work out the substitution in ANGELIC or the use of “skin” as an imperative in APPLE. I’d never heard of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and don’t feel at all bad about that. Dredged out of somewhere the fact that Mr Guevara, poster-boy of countless student walls in the late 60s (usually, as in my case, students for whom Che Guevara would have had no time whatever), was Argentinian rather than Cuban.
    Where 1a is concerned, we all agree to have hissy fits about indirect anagrams for no good reason other than that the late Mr Macnutt said that we should. Why is “like songs of devotion” > anthemic + “come together” > gel acceptable? Would an indirect allusion to “them” make it unacceptable?
    One or two really fine ones in here – I thought the very accurately assembled combination of devices plus the excellent surface for INADEQUACY was quite brilliant, and the misdirection in 26a was cleverly done. “Prop” is one of the politer synonyms for Truss that I have seen…
    Thanks to Fed for an interesting start to the day and to PeterO for the customarily excellent blog.

  28. I thought this was really hard until I got HERO and a couple of anagrams, and then I found I could just bung in my guesses and they turned out to be right!
    Liked DYNAMO and HALF NELSON in particular.
    Thanks Fed, PeterO and early bloggers

  29. @26 Alec you have posted exactly what I was going to. Some brilliant clues and some that reminded me of the boring prophet in Life of Brian.

  30. FrankieG@7. Seems OMD were slightly obsessed with Joan of Arc. They followed-up that single with ‘Maid of Orleans (Joan of Arc Waltz)’ which also reached no. 5 in the charts.

  31. This is the second week in a row that I have escaped a fiendish puzzle to blog by one day. I’m beginning to fear that my luck can’t hold out for much longer.

    I had some of the same difficulties with parsing (1ac, 14ac, 24ac – thanks, PeterO!) as others but I’m glad I persevered with the puzzle because there was much to admire. The clue for INADEQUACY did seem extraordinarily wordy but I enjoyed working it out, along with ASPERSIONS, AREA, SATISFYING, ADIPOSE and APROPOS and I was chuffed to see the trick in ENTENTE straight away, rather than being led down rabbit holes.
    BRIEFED raised a big smile.

    Thanks to Fed for the work-out and to PeterO for the explanations.

  32. With Fed I often find myself getting one bit of the wordplay, then seeing the definition and then seeing the rest of the parsing, so you get a series of little aha moments. Nice 4d.

  33. There’s some real negativity over on the site itself about this puzzle, but by the time I looked at the comments I was over half way through and it didn’t take me that much longer to finish. I’m not having a go at people finding this a difficult solve or a tedious slog (words I often use), I’m just struck by the variance in relation to my own experience today. Whereas I struggled with Tuesday’s and didn’t finish, but overall people seemed to find it an absolute blinder.

    Again, maybe a wavelength thing: if so then I was largely on it today, found this great fun and only had a real question mark with BRIOCHE and CRESS in terms of parsing. Loved 7, 14, 16a and 17.

  34. Some tricky parsing in here! Failed to figure out ANGELIC although fair enough in retrospect.

    Just the right level of chewiness for me.

    Really like the very neat HALF NELSON.

    Thanks Fed and PeterO

  35. I must be getting accustomed to Fed’s rather tortuous and wordy style because I didn’t find this as taxing as usual. The constructions for BRIOCHE and GESTALT are clever, and give a beautiful surface, but twelve and thirteen words respectively are a bit much.

    I failed to parse ANGELIC and life is too short to work out the wordplay for INADEQUACY but I managed to rationalise the rest.

    I agree with ‘play about’ = LARK – ‘about’ doesn’t work as a connector. I particularly liked ‘skin marked with spots’, BRIEFED, LANDAU, HALF NELSON and APROPOS and the two quoted above, despite their inordinate length. CRESS is clever, though I don’t think ‘compress’ and ‘stuff’ are quite synonymous, though semantically related. I thought POWER TOOL was uncharacteristically weak for such an ingenious setter.

    Thanks to Fed and PeterO

  36. I seem to be having problems with SW corners lately. I was another LIONTAMER for a while, too, and a fail on the ANGELIC parse. I should have twigged OMD earlier, as I taught on the Wirral in the late 70s (OMD being Wirral boys). I agree with Alec @26, but there were other excellent clues. Thanks, Fed and PeterO.

  37. Thanks for the blog , saludos a todos , I thought this was really good, clever wordplay and imagination throughout , ANGELIC , CRESS , ADIPOSE and THEISTS just some examples.
    I did wonder if LION TAMER was one word but I waited until I had put the Downs in and got the Z.
    DYNAMO , I won’t start , Chambers gives support for the setter but my students would be in trouble.

  38. Like scraggs @33, I also had a look at the G site halfway through and was bemused by the negativity. I couldn’t parse ANGELIC either and was too lazy to parse INADEQUACY. Same parsing of LARK as others. Loved BRIEFED, BRIOCHE, ZOOKEEPER (I didn’t think of LIONTAMER, funnily enough), HALF NELSON and it’s link with SPONSOR.
    I think Fed missed a trick with ENTENTE as he could have had 8, 9, 10 as ENT and then 11 and 12 in extremis, leading to 13 in the next clue. Very clever setting throughout.

    Ta Fed & PeterO, for perseverance.

  39. From the definitions I was able to complete APPLE, CROSSWORD PUZZLE, ZOOKEEPER, HALF NELSON, DRYNESS, AIRER, GOLDEN DELICIOUS, BRIEFED, IN A NEST and HERO. Thanks Peter for unravelling the rest of it and Fed for coming up with the tricky clues.

  40. I echo the thoughts of most who found this knotty. I’ll just add that I failed to parse GESTALT having tried to derive it somehow from ‘gestate’ (grow), to no avail.

  42. Got there in the end, but mainly due to working backwards from the likely answer and trying to make it fit the clue.

    I don’t want to come across as the class swot, but aren’t there a couple of grammatical slips here? Shouldn’t 1d read, “… this company makes tablets.”? And at 25a, ‘One might show pride in his (or her) work”

  43. [Roger GS @41
    I’ve never believed the story that Nelson was preserved in brandy. He may have been put in a brandy barrel, but I suspect that it was then filled with rum (carried for the crew) rather than brandy (carried for the officers).]

  44. For some reason, I solved this more easily than many others here seem to have. I’m not saying it was easy for me by any means! I failed to parse CROSSWORD PUZZLE, and had never heard of OMD (though I correctly assumed it was a band I hadn’t heard of). But the whole thing went steadily for me–not a slog at all. This is a contrast to some other puzzles where the reverse is true–I struggle only to find comments here about how straightforward it all was.

  45. William @42: you clearly have missed the grammatical revolution of the last few years, in which it was decided that singular “they” to denote a person of unknown or arbitrary gender (or a gender-fluid person) is acceptable now. But I agree with your other quibble.

  46. I found this chewy, but enjoyable. Some of the clues were solved first and parsed after. Some of them were not parsed at all (I’m looking at you CRESS and ANGELIC), but it was a lovely workout. INANEST seems to be a favourite word of setters at the moment, or maybe it’s just synchronicity that all the INANEST clues are coming at once. DYNAMO, HALF NELSON, APROPOS and ASPERSIONS were probably my favourites.

    Thanks Fed and PeterO

  47. Thanks Fed. After solving 4d and 20ac fairly early I wasted time searching for a J and an X in the remaining clues.

    Also in parsing 18 I couldn’t see past Mikel LANDA the Basque cyclist currently 5th in the Tour De France. Although only 5ft 6 (1.72m) he is a big character and subject of the cult of Landismo.

  48. Ok prof roz @37, I’ll bite: what does a dynamo produce, then?
    Btw, nice to keep saluting España,’s two big wins (and that boy, Rafa’s heir, is muy lindo)

  49. [ Grant@48 it produces an emf equal to the rate of change of flux linkage , the units have to be Volts for homogeneity . Only a current if connected to a complete circuit , the emf is always there regardless. Chambers , though, does support the setter . ]

  50. Some clues a bit convoluted for my taste, but some nice neat ones, HALF NELSON my favourite.

    William @42 and mrpenney @45: a collective noun can take a singular or plural verb, depending on whether we are thinking of it as a unit or as the individuals who make up that unit. “The jury were allowed to go home to their families each day” (example from The Britannica Dictionary).

    Thanks Fed and PeterO.

  52. William @42 and mrpenney @45: Further to Lord Jim’s comment @50, it is usual
    In British but not American English to use plural verbs with company names: ‘Tesco have put up their prices’. And although the use of ‘they’ as a genderless singular pronoun is a recent development, ‘their’ as a singular has long been used distributively: ‘Each to their own’.

  53. I was going to blame a visit to the dentist for the struggle I had with parts of this crossword but I see others had similar experiences

    My favourite clue was 16a

    Many thanks to Fed and PeterO

  54. I assumed that in 16A Fed was a reference to the Federal Reserve Bank, which sets US interest rates. I hadn’t noticed it was also the name of today’s crossword setter!

  55. mrpenny@45 & passim: my Fowler and Gowers (1965, p365) supports the use of singular subjects with plural pronouns as a means of avoiding gender bias, and cites Fielding, Goldsmith, Sydney Smith, Bagehot, Bernard Shaw and Ruskin. Hardly “the last few years”.

  58. TassieTim @55: There is a distinction between the longstanding usage of ‘they’ instead of ‘one’ as a gender neutral pronoun when referring to an unspecified individual, as by the authors you list, and its much more recent usage to refer to a named person to avoid either ‘he’ or ‘she’. That is what mrpenney was alluding to.

  59. A small issue I had was that because so many of the clues were hugely convoluted, I actually took ages to get the simpler ones because I was trying to read too much into them. Nothing wrong with that, its quite fun when you realise… except the trick only works if there are loads of hugely convoluted clues which aren’t my thing.

  61. Lord Jim @50: thank you, point taken, but in this case the wording “… this company…” I would say expressly refers to the whole, not the individuals within it. Wouldn’t you agree?

  62. I must have found OMD somewhat underwhelming as I had completely forgotten them.

    Some excellent clues such as HALF NELSON, some tortured parsing, and a lion tamer who turned out to be a zookeeper. Apart from occasionally being too clever by half, my main complaint is that I am not a fan of unspecified numbers of words being included by an indicator – for example “bass singers – ultimately” could be SS or S or in this case HSS etc. Other examples were “my skin finally” and “her client initially”. This is OK in the shorter clues where there are fewer permutations of candidate parsings, and generally OK with clues where the whole solution is anagrammed (because the length of the solution helps to determine what is included in the anagram fodder), but for me it borders on unfairness in a convoluted lengthy clue. On the other hand, I acknowledge that this level of difficulty may be welcome to very skilful solvers.

    After difficulty getting going, most of this puzzle progressed quite nicely for me if I ignored a couple of parsing issues and used the check button to confirm, but in the end I just couldn’t see CRESS and (unusually) gave up and revealed.

    [Roz @49, in practical terms, isn’t the whole purpose of a dynamo to produce a current?]

  65. Extremely complicated. Got nearly all the answers but couldn’t understand why. Fed is definitely a Marmite setter. Seems to me Mr G likes convoluted cluing! TA for the blog: definitely needed it today.

  67. Personally I don’t mind having to reverse parse a few. INADEQUACY was a good example where the answer was obvious but it was fun unpicking the wordplay. And I originally thought the angry argument was CROSS WORD so Freddie seemed redundant

    Gervase that’s interesting to know about the plurals – the singular just didn’t quite sound like idiomatic English to my ear

  69. Apologies to those who are getting fed up with this grammatical discussion, but just to reply to William @61: I in turn take your point, and in fact would personally prefer “this company makes” to “this company make”. But my point was that either is possible with a collective noun. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (I have the same edition as TassieTim @55) refers to them as “nouns of multitude”, and says “They are treated as singular or plural at discretion”.

  70. Just to add to the wrong answers to 25a (LIONTAMER, LIONESSES), I originally had ZOOLOGIST (until the crossers proved otherwise). Thanks to PeterO and Fed.

  71. Regarding Lord Jim and William’s discussion:

    1. I never get fed up with grammatical discussions! And I suspect I’m not the only one here with this particular peccadillo.

    2. Perhaps everyone knows this, but just in case: this is one of those points of grammar that differs depending on one’s side of the Atlantic. In US English, “the company make” sounds wrong, but in UK English it’s fine (or so I’ve been told).

    (Actually, perhaps I’m being imprecise in referring to sides of the Atlantic: I don’t know what the Canadians do in this case. And since Canada is often forgotten in this way, I should be more careful.)

  72. [One morphologically singular noun which is almost always treated as a plural is ’people’, in the sense of ‘persons’ rather than ‘ethnic group’. I think many people would agree….]

  73. [Nelson’s famous signal before Trafalgar starts “England expects…” rather than “England expect…”.
    (In fact Nelson wanted “England confides…”, meaning “is confident”, but it was pointed out to him that “expects” took fewer flags.)]

  76. [gladys @75
    Gervase’s example @74 shows how England can be singular or plural depending on context.]

  78. This was by no means easy, but I didn’t find it as hard as the trio of DNFs across the middle of last week. A good half dozen unparsed (thank you Peter) so I put my success down to a friendly grid arrangement. Favourites were SPONSOR and BRIEFED.

  79. I found this fairly straightforward. Maybe doing it in reverse clue order helped.
    I liked the GOLDEN DELICIOUS anagram. Contrarily to many here, HALF NELSON seemed a little cheesy.
    Get = grow seemed wrong at first, but works in the phrase get/grow accustomed, so no worries.
    dnf @66, your moniker seems unnecessarily pessimistic 🙂.
    Thanks, Fed and PeterO

  80. Thanks Fed and PeterO for brilliant puzzle and blog; esp ‘angelic’ parsing. After last week’s Enigmatist – well done for that blog too! – which stressed me out to solve, I’m thinking the ‘look for straight definition ie treat like quick crossword’ is the way to go with solving tricky crosswords, but is a shame, and the great puzzles don’t invite it. Enigmatist is clearly a crossword genius – solver as well as setter- and to solve crosswords as quickly as he famously does maybe encourages this approach in his setting?

  82. Late to the party as usual – we usually come to it “When the hurly-burly’s done,
    When the battle’s lost and won – in the summer, ere the set of sun.” We go “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
    It were done quickly”, so we use the check button if unsure.
    We had to look up Inadequacy and Dynamo.
    It feels like playing tennis doubles with old friends who are better than us. Sometimes we win! But not today.

  83. I will not go as far as Monkey @62 in not being a fan of the use of an indicator to indicate odd letters to be used in wordplay. However, I grant that I can see why Monkey could object to its *over*use — as PeterO so neatly points out with his use of bold capitals in the blog, 15 occasions in 29 clues. To wit:

    Take only the first letter:
    5A: …self at the outset…
    20A …client initially…
    26A …starts in 8, 9…
    27A …pawn shop primarily…
    8D …stockings to begin with…

    Take only the second letter:
    20A …just second, lawyer advising her…

    Take only the middle letter:
    4D …focus of Freddie…
    22D …Admiral essentially…

    Take only the last letter:
    12A …bass singers ultimately…
    15A …my skin — finally…
    16D …finish from Messi…

    Take only the outside letters:
    21A …race on vacation
    26A …12, in extremis…
    7D …Arbuckle’s coat…

    Take only the alternate letters:
    2D …Ewoks regularly…

    Plus a bonus for take only the inside letters, which technically does not belong on this list, because we have to look for a synonym first:
    1D …skin marked with spots…
    and a special bonus, for take the second three letters, in the admirable:
    27a …13…

  84. Test match highlights mean even later than usual. Nothing more to add to what’s been said apart from agreeing this was more of a challenge than the usual Fed and a couple of the parsings were beyond me. Did smile at 4d. Thanks fed petero and the batters who managed double figures.

  86. Crosswords are supposed to be fun. This wasn’t. Too many tortuous constructions outweighed the few moments of elegance and deftness.

  87. I felt sure some other nitpicker would bring this up, but it seems not. Apple doesn’t ‘make’ the tablets sold under their/its name. They are largely made in China by Foxconn. People at Apple conceive, design and market products, but making is outsourced.

  88. Reference to Lark, I didn’t know the JA connection ( I studied Antigone) but, and this may be in bad Joan of Arc taste , I did wonder about a different take on “Singer” .
    Perhaps overcooking it a bit.
    Paul

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