Azed 1899/19th October

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A nice crossword from Azed, with several good clues. His grids are always excellent: how he manages to fit in so many long words and avoid using three-letter-words I don’t know.

Across
1 STARCH BLOCKER — (charts)* b locker
10 W(HEATE(d))AR
13 BART ‘S — I think is briefly has to be ‘s and not simply s, which it usually is
14 CAROLI — car (oil)*
15 RISOTTO — (Rosti’s)* to — this I found difficult to explain, but tucked away in the Chambers definition of ‘beside’ is ‘to’
16 MELAS — m (sale)rev. — as in the previous one two words are not apparently synonyms, but there they are in Chambers: sale and demand
18 RELAXANT — (tax learn)*
20 SEEK-NO-FURTHER — see (hunter fork)* — Azed is very relaxed about anagram indicators: just about anything goes, so long as it has some connotation of disturbance
22 A S(BEST)OS — &lit.
25 SHONA — (Noahs)*
26 S TANZ AS
27 CARANX — ca “ranks” — as always in such situations Azed gives plenty of help: it’s under ‘carangid’
28 G(I B(randished))BS — ref. the West Indies cricketer Lance Gibbs
29 C(IN)EREAL — to in is to harvest (yes, really) — for a long time I couldn’t explain this because I thought for ages that ‘about’ meant ‘c’, and I couldn’t see why ‘ereal’ meant ‘e.g. corn’
30 DISTINGUISHED — d (suiting)* I shed — here ‘D___’ is simply the letter d and not some weird notation indicating a comp.anag., something I can never understand
 
Down
1 SUB ROSA — (a sorbus)rev. — this is a good clue, but it seems awfully familiar; I’m sure Azed has used this idea before — perhaps someone can remember when?  Maybe it was someone else.
2 TWAITE SHAD — (death waits)* — the paper says ‘(10, words)’, which may have caused difficulties
3 R((n)E(s)T)OOK
4 CASTE — (a sect)* — I’ve always wonderered if it’s safe to use the word ‘represented’ in the sense ‘re-presented’ in the Azed clue competions. Now I know.
5 BEG 0
6 LACKLUSTRE — la((luck)*)st (c)re(w)
7 CARE X
8 KOOLAHS — la in (shook)rev.
9 manuRE I Spread
11 T(E TROT OX)IN
12 PLANET ABLE
17 REBORES — (soberer)*
19 TRUSSED — “trust”
21 T(IN)IES
23 EN(A(ssorted) C(lassics))T
24 PAGRI — if you put ‘sun’ round this you get ‘sup agrin’ — a very rare case of the definition being in the middle of the clue
25 S(C)AD — wordplay and two definitions
26 SON G

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