Guardian 26,423 by Enigmatist

68 comments on “Guardian 26,423 by Enigmatist”

1. Thanks PO.

   I found this a bit easier than many an Enigmatist but still fairly tough.

   Plenty to enjoy though – especially the biggies.

   I suppose strictly “too” is going spare in 1a 4a – one of the rare examples of cryptic licence actually being used by a nominally “libertarian setter. I think it earns its keep though.

   Thanks for resolving 2d 13d – I had missed “tie”.

   7d – CETE is the collective noun for a group of badgers – once you have that it’s a fairly straightforward wordplay. Part of my store of useless information accumulated by doing crossword puzzles and never used again – until it comes up in another puzzle. Have to admit – it was a guess (if inkling inspired) and google.

2. Can’t help you with 12a – stuck on that too. Will have to await illumination.

   Only thought was TRATTORIA coming into it somewhere but couldn’t get anywhere with that. You wouldn’t really call them restaurants, except in the way that a McDonalds is called a hamburger restaurant.

3. 12a looks like IN SE in TRAT to me.

4. Agree with Phi @ 3 on 12a.

   I parsed 7d as ‘ec’ (= Eric Clapton aka ‘slowhand’, initially) + r in set (= band?) + e (= 5).

   A tough day at the grid. Thanks to E and PeterO

5. Thanks PO

   A possible thought on the 12a wordplay
   trainset = train* = intra = in itself

   probably too convoluted and then why restaurant?

6. It’s perhaps not clear in the blog that cookie is a “PC ID” in the sense of “a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s web browser“.

   I agree with Phi about 12a and with Andrew C about 7d. And with everyone else that this was hard!

7. Thanks Enigmatist and PeterO

   As ever, easier to finish than parse (and finishing was hard!) First pass I had OTTO VON BISMARCK, POST IT and A DAY AT THE RACES (as with PeterO, solely from the enumeration, but in contrast I didn’t then working out the parsing.) 5, 7, and 17 also remained unparsed (though I also wondered if Eric Clapton was relevant to 7).

   As a chemist, I’m embarrassed to admit that I googled “Li Na” and found that she was a tennis player. I laughed out loud when the penny dropped.

   I thought that it was clever to have a grid with only two squares in common to top and bottom, but to compensate by using solutions that went into both parts.

8. ……oh, and 12 (LOI) unparsed as well, of course.

9. 7d slowhand is the fifth studio album by English recording artist Eric Clapton (his nickname), any use?

10. AndrewC @4 seems to have done it. Andrew, next time you post could you use capital letters.

11. I think I prefer Andrew’s (#4) parsing of 7d to my earlier one.

    Still no advance on 12a.

    The Scots word AIN (=own) occurs to me as a possible component – but no idea where to go with it.

12. I think AndrewC @4 has 7D.

    12A is:

    An envelope (‘covered’) of IN SE (Latin, ‘in itself’) in TRAT (abbreviation for trattoria, ‘restaurant’).

13. Tough but enjoyable; thank you for the blog PeterO. I needed your parsing of 1d & could have kicked myself when I read it – an excellent clue.

14. 12a, I agree with Phi @3, just noting a “self” is a self service restaurant.

15. @PO #12 – thanks – I see now that that’s what Phi at #3 meant. Didn’t twig the Latin. SE as in PER SE – common enough I suppose.

16. Not common enough for me, I’m afraid. I did manage the last Enigmatist, but not this one – couldn’t parse a very long list. Did anyone else think for a moment that the animal backwards in 22a might be Murder/Red Rum? Also took me a long time to find out that the last word of 24 was CORRECTED not CONVICTED.

    Many thanks to those much cleverer than me for putting me out of my misery.

17. That should be thanks to Enigmatist, definitely thanks to PeterO

    A great puzzle. Even if I had spent longer on the parsing, I would still have have needed PeterO’s help.

    16d, first put OBSERVE, OSERVE with B thinking those who served were indeed in a precarious position being on the King’s list. Later the crossers put me right.

    Gladys @16, yes, I felt as though I were at the mill with slaves.

    19d, TUMBLER with R and L exchanged? (I think PeterO was tired as he neared the end of the blog)

18. Thanks both. Nowhere near completing today, but a fine crossword nonetheless. I like how Ivan the Terrible fits the enumeration to the clue referencing him.

    Having only the R is 22, I did wonder if it might somehow be ISRAEL, hidden backwards in cLEAR SIgn. No way for that to work with the wordplay, of course.

19. Thanks Enigmatist – the usual tough fare.

    Thanks PeterO & Andrew C – I got the slowhand=eric but still didn’t finish the parsing. I think the fifth band must be ‘set E,’ otherwise fifth seems to be in the wrong place.

    ‘In se’ is actually in Chambers.

    I liked the ALKALI METALS and the interconnecting ACT FOUR.

20. Lots unparsed (although thankfully the crossers were generous, so I managed to at least get everything except EYELESS and TUMBREL), but a really fun puzzle and some excellent misdirection. Spent a long time trying to put “AM” into a four letter word for “well” before the penny dropped on FITTER.

21. I got eight answers and then gave up. Thanks PeterO for the parsing of 5d and for the answers to the rest. I wouldn’t have got most of these if I’d kept on trying.

    This is probably my worst result with the Guardian cryptic in 30 years. Am I just having a bad day, or would this puzzle have been more appropriate as a Guardian Genius?

22. I thoroughly enjoyed this despite not finishing it, which I would say is a real sign of quality. Thanks to Enigmatist, PeterO and others. I needed help from all of Check, Cheat, this blog and its commenters to get to the bottom of this one.

    I’m slightly annoyed by 10a. A cookie doesn’t necessarily identify the computer it’s stored on – it could, for example, just store your progress on a crossword. I would have been happier with a question mark on the definition.

23. Totally unfiar a lot of it which is why it’s so hard. Say, SE is only ‘itself’ in use in English as part of the borrowed Latin phrase PER SE, so it’s far too much to expect as is.

    I don’t like dumbing-down generally because people are far too bright for all that, but here? This is an example of a disease called COMPILERITIS!

    🙂

24. hedgehoggy @23

    As Robi @19 points out, IN SE is in Chanbers (as is TRAT, which is where I might have found them in the first place) – or try googling the expression for various examples of its use. Dumbing down?

25. Another tricky but entertaining challenge from the all too rarely spotted Enigmatist. Not quite as fiendish as the last one (probably because OTTO VON BISMARCK and A DAY AT THE RACES went in early), but there were still a few I struggled to parse, and I did need to use Check a couple of times to confirm the guesses. Penultimate one in was the clever ALKALI METALS, after which ACT FOUR suddenly became obvious. Liked the motherless raincoat too. I think AndrewC is right re the parsing of SECRETE.

    Thanks to Enigmatist and PeterO

26. Thanks to Enigmatist and PeterO.

    Could someone explain the ellipses between 22 and 14 across? I thought the answers were connected so entered MARKED for 22 across – I know, I know, the last three letters don’t work but I was getting tired.

27. I was another non-finisher (did about two-thirds), but enjoyed it greatly. Never came anywhere near ALKALI METALS; COOKIE and LET ME SEE were very good, among others. Thanks to Enigmatist and PeterO.

28. judygs @26, no idea, but your MARKED is brilliant, a KED is a RAM (sheep) tick.

29. The clue I didn’t understand was 1D.

    If it’s “unfair”, it’s because the editor has overestimated the breadth and depth of knowledge a solver of the Guardian crossword can be expected to have. I do know the breakdown of the Acts in Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth, but I didn’t for JC. JC is a sufficiently important part of the canon for its structure to be known by people who fancy themselves as clever Guardianistas (which would probably not be true of Love’s Labour’s Lost), just as one’s probably expected to know the major events of each part of the sodding Ring cycle (which I can’t abide and therefore have no clue about). So I reckon I came into a battle of wits somewhat underequipped. Can’t win ’em all.

    It’s not the setter’s primary responsibility to work out what’s too obscure for the audience, and the setter shouldn’t assume that the solver is nekulturny.

30. Alchemi @29 – love the word nekulturny – look forward to it appearing in a future Enigmatist…

31. I wonder if anyone agrees with my parsing of 12ac, if you take “train” to be an anagram indicator, the letters from “set” can be found “covered” in rESTaurant and “in” iTSElf
    Does this make sense to anyone else?
    Cheers
    MikeS

32. MIKE S @31, is TRAIN from ‘intra’ (in itself, as Fearsome @5 has it)? I wouldn’t try too hard with this one. Think Phi @3 and PeterO @12 have agreed on the answer. PeterO seems permanently afflicted after the effort, he still hasn’t got the wording of 19d right.

33. Like others, I found this stupid-hard. As in, so hard it made me feel stupid. As an added soupcon of torture, it featured Cockney rhyming slang (butcher’s), an obscure old bit of the British education system (eleven-pluses), and a couple other phrases Americans don’t use that often.

    On the other hand, I was trained as a lawyer, so the phrase “in se” comes naturally to me.

    I follow tennis, and so spent a long time trying to work some tennis terminology into the first across entry.

    On a related note, I had missed the news that Li Na had retired; thanks to PeterO for filling me in on that.

34. Alkali Metals first one in for me. Marten last I too had Marked. Pleased as a novice that i could complete (with some help from checker) when some stalwarts were stumped…….

35. judygs @26

    I think the only reason for the ellipses between 22 an 24 is the Enigmatist needed ‘and’ for the anagram, and ‘and’ asks for something to which to be conjoined.

    Alchemi @29

    I do not think that Enigmatist is in any way unfair here: I feel that it is rather general general knowledge that the first part of the clue refers to JC (Julius Caesar, that is, not the one from a few generations later), and if you cannot give chapter and verse of the play, a quick dip in a dictionary if quotations, or google of Et tu, Brute – again very well known – will fill the gap. My difficulty with the clue was spotting Enigmatist’s joke.

    beery hiker @30

    Nice one!

36. Thanks PeterO and Enigmatist. I didn’t finish this one but there was still lots to enjoy. Personal favourites today were 2d and 3d – I struggled with both but finally appreciated both the certainty of the correct answers and the precision of the clueing. Like John Appleton@18, I was tempted in 22a by ISRAEL – was that a deliberate misdirection, I wonder?

37. Finished this Enig. crossword – still have some clues outstanding on his previous crossword.

    Our chemistry master suggested we placed a copy of the periodic table beside our shaving mirrors. Terrible bore. Nearly fifty years later I still remember most of it. As soon as I saw Li & Na together I was able to write in the first across clue.

    In spite of never having read Julius Caesar, guessed the answer to 1d.

    Thought I was heading for a record time but could not parse 12ac and 7dn.

    A very well thought out, enjoyable crossword.

    Many thanks to setter and blogger.

38. Unlike the last Enigmatist puzzle I actually completed this one. I thought there were enough relatively easy clues spread out around the grid for their crossers to confirm the trickier clues that were possibilities from their definitions. Of course parsing some of those was a different matter and like most others I failed on 7 & 12, but also on 22 (MARTEN).

    Two minor gripes: Whilst pleasingly clever, I nevertheless felt the definition for 1,4 ‘Li Na’ was a bit loose and needed some ‘example’ indicator to make it fair. Similarly, storing an ID is just one of many possible uses for a browser cookie, and so needed the same.

    Thanks to Enigmatist, PeterO, and of course all those who helped to parse the most enigmatic clues.

39. judygs @26, could the ellipses between 22 and 24 relate somehow to martinet (whip similar to the cat o’nine tails) MAR TI (IT back) NET? Seems rather far fetched.

40. I usually avoid Enigmatist as I end up frustrated and feeling stupid, like Mr Penney. But Mrs Beaver was feeling bullish, and much to my surprise, we managed to finish it although we were unable to parse several – the same ones that gave others trouble.
    So thanks to Peter for a) providing the explanations for some, and b) also failing to parse 12a – made me feel much better ! 🙂

    I don’t think this crossword demanded an unreasonable amount of general knowledge – though I can see 1a,4a being tough on non-scientists. And there was some humour to leaven the toil.

    But I did find some of the clues a little unfair, by including redundant words which one would expect to be significant, ie ‘Regularly’ in 10a, ‘evident’ in 22a

41. Mr and Mrs Beaver @40, could ‘evident’ in 22a have something to do with the ellipses between it and 24a?

42. Rule One of Fifteen Squared should be ‘never start Enigmatist late in the afternoon or you’ll never post in time’. Here goes anyway.

    To begin, all went deceptively smoothly, if not exactly quick, helped by the enumerations of the long clues – A DAY AT THE RACES an almost unprecedented Enigmatist write-in. Alas eventually the two 1 clues saw me off. ACT FOUR became my GORING of the day, comeuppance for boasting about my geographical knowledge the day before. And without it ALKALI METALS was a closed book, being sure that the top row was filled with a plucky Brit tennis loser of Baltic extraction whose gallant defeats had alas passed me by.

43. Very late to the party today.

    I had to be out from mid-morning, by which time I had filled in only half or dozen or so answers and hoped that a break might have the usual effect of helping me fill in a few more. In the event, just a handful – and I’d had no internet access all day, so no possibility of ‘cheats’.

    Then, suddenly, when I’d practically given up, I managed to get into 15² and I saw PeterO’s great blog and all the other comments and realised that I probably would never have finished, anyway.

    [A chastening experience for me:’Be careful what you wish for’. Yesterday, I was regretting getting a bland Chifonie, rather than something meatier – eg an Enigmatist? – to blog. I’d certainly have got my come-uppance! I’m now thanking my lucky stars that this one fell to PeterO rather than me. Huge thanks to him – and, of course, to Enigmatist [especialy for 1dn 😉 ]

44. I really do know how to spell ‘especially’.

45. Eileen – I’ve never doubted your spelling ability. But wht don’t you install a spellchecker, like me? (Oops!)

46. Hi cholecyst

    As I’m sure you know, it was a typographical error! 😉

47. @35 PeterO

    I wasn’t saying the clue was unfair – I put the word in quotes because some earlier posters had used the term.

    But I’m not over-keen on your proposed remedy of lugging dictionaries of quotations around with me when I’m solving a puzzle over a coffee. I object to the idea that Mon-Fri puzzles should require reference books. In this case, though, I’m happy to concede that I ought to have known that JC gets bumped off halfway through the show, and that it’ll be my own fault if someone insists on setting a puzzle based on the Ring Cycle which means I have to know more of it than “Be vewy vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits” and the bit with the helicopters and the smell of napalm in the morning.

48. This person should not be allowed to write crosswords. If people know the answers and still can’t get the reason after a whole day one has to ask the question, what is the point?

    How many people under 40 will get eleven plus? Brit = limey. No way! At least put some reference to “American would say”. South East of France contraction = SEOFF. How are we supposed to know he contracts some words and not the others?

    As for “addled=off”… Time to move back to the Independent again.

49. Angstony @38

    I had intended to include the question mark in the definition of 1A, as one of the conventional uses of that sign is to indicate a definition by example. I have just noticed that that did not happen, and have corrected the blog.

    cholecyst @45

    That’s certainly the way to avoid making a spelling moustache.

    Alchemi @47

    I regularly solve crosswords in my armchair with a stack of books at my elbow – Chambers, Shakespeare, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Brewers (with Chambers at the top as the only one I use with any regularity). But google doesn’t weigh much. If you do not want to use aids at all, that’s fine, but you must expect to fall into gaps in your knowledge now and then.

50. Thank you Jim Dale @48 for saying out loud what I was thinking. If it’s just me that can’t understand a clue, that’s my weakness. If the kind of solvers who comment here regularly have difficulty, that’s the clue’s fault.

51. PeterO @ 49

    Which leads to the question of what it’s reasonable to expect people to know.

    On which opinions are clearly going to differ. I don’t think it unreasonable to expect knowledge of the basic plot of Julius Caesar, but I think expecting people to know Cymbeline or Timon of Athens is probably a bit much. I would have assumed that a moderately-cultured person would have a basic knowledge of the works of Frank Zappa, but I doubt many would agree, even though I’m prepared to acknowledge that my ignorance of Verdi is my fault.

52. Jim Dale @48 ‘How many people under 40 will get eleven plus?’ Alas it’s not dead yet. A few weeks ago a drive through Ilford was sorely delayed by the queues for said sifting.

53. Only managed half of this – held up by entering “Peanuts” for 3dn (Well, they do enter a monkey one way or another) but that gave OvB with a “van” which was clearly wrong.

    Thought the Shakespeare clue was superb.

54. Wow, we solved this puzzle (unaided) in about 90 minutes.
    Well done us.

    Some of you used the word “unfair”.
    Personally, I think, for example, 1d is not unfair – but I do think it is one of the weaker clues here, though.
    As always with Enigmatist it is hard to find a way in but once you’ll get there (for us: 6,23 – 9ac – 3d – 20d) it’s not that bad.
    John H is not just a nice and cheerful person, he is also a setter in a league of his own.
    This should have been tomorrow’s Prize Puzzle – instead we’ll get another (surely enjoyable) one by the other John H.

    Gold medals for (e.g.) 1,4 and 2,13 and 7) but a missed opportunity at the ellipsis. ‘Marker’ (or perhaps ‘marked’) at 22ac would have made more sense in connection with the fabulous 24ac, another Gold.

    Despite whatever, this was great stuff.
    Even if a crossword like last Saturday’s Picaroon is more up my street, stylistically.
    Even if I once accused Nimrod of the same thing that Hedgehoggy calls “compileritis”.
    Even if the Man on the Tube had to finish it after work, if ever he did.

    Wonderful.

55. Without knowing the plot details of JC (despite having seen it once !), I think veni, vedi, vici (or its English translation) is common-enough knowledge to know it is JC, hence a play. With the first word being A?T this implies ACT – and with other crossing-letters, FOUR looks likely, at which point I thought, ah yes, I suppose coming, seeing and conquering must be the first (so only ?) 3, QED. So you don’t need to be a professor of Eng Lit to get it.
    To those who think it’s the clue’s fault for being too hard, I would advocate patience…

56. Mrs Mac and I have a crossword span of attention that lasts about an hour. If we have a substantial part of the grid unfilled after 60 minutes we get bored and annoyed. I have to ask what is the point of such a crossword as this? Apart from pissing off faithful Guardian readers (yes, paper version, 40 years).Clues so long you’ve forgotten the start by the end, ridiculous “bitsa” this and that shoehorned together, and parsing so hard the self-styled experts on here don’t get it. I’ve just bought a 3 volume collection of Araucaria puzzles from a well-known discounter. Two observations – that’s the way to do it; and I might give up the Grauniad for the three months or so that they will last us.

57. Well someone’s gotta push the boundaries – that’s what Araucaria was up to AFAIK* – and Enigmatist (also Nimrod: see the blog for another fantastic puzzle just across the way) is your man. Some of this stuff IS hard to parse, and sometimes quite weird, but twas ever thus with this brilliant writer. And it makes the PDM (*FFS I hate acronyms) so much more worthwhile.

    This stuff is great, Steve Vai to your average Eric Clapton for sure, but OMG I think we really need it.

58. By breakfast time today, I had an answer to every clue. Three turned out to be wrong but as I couldn’t parse a dozen or more anyway, they were worth a guess. Yes, it was difficult but I like a challenge. It comes down to how much time one is prepared to spend struggling and does the setter really expect us to solve without access to a computer? I think this one was over the limit.

    Well done PeterO. I’m glad it wasn’t my job to explain the solutions!

59. john mccartney @56

    Who, here, has ever styled him/herself as an expert?

60. Finished this finally this morning. I thought this harder than the last ENIGMATIST – at least I managed to parse that one. A disturbing number of these were “solved” by a sort of osmosis.LOI was ACT FOUR WHICH was, in retrospect,rather a good clue. Favourite was aLKALI METALS which took an age to get.
    Bloody hard but,reluctantly, none the worse for that.

61. Thanks Enigmatist. I was pleased to complete more than 3/4 of this without recourse to external aids.

    1/4 across & 1 down were beyond me, so the NW corner was my sticking point.

    I couldn’t parse 12 across and a few others (thanks to PeterO and posters).

62. I’m an expert, Eileen.

    I used to be pert, but now so many of the bits are sagging.

63. Paul B

    🙂

    You’ve restored my good humour.

64. Brilliant stuff but very hard.

    ACT FOUR was my second last – a wonderful penny-drop when I remembered that Caesar dies in Act 3 so of course he doesn’t appear in Act 4…but he does! He appears as a ghost in Act 4 Scene 3! Hahaha!

65. I’m nervous among such experts, but… 22a has the definition in the middle. I thought I could rely on it being one end or the other.

66. @65
    It doesn’t have to be at either end, it just often is, as it’s quite hard to get it to work anywhere else.

67. After 3 days looking after 3 nephews/nieces I have only just finished this.

    Nothing to add except that this was a very enjoyable but difficult puzzle.

    I did eventually mange to parse everything before I came here.

    I’m only posting to say that I strongly disagree with the posters who assert that this was unfair. All clues were fair and gettable from the wordplay. The fact that ones lack of knowledge means one has to check the derived answer doesn’t make the clue unfair. It just means your a “thicky” ( 😉 Joke )

    Thanks to PeterO and Enigmatist

68. Thanks Enigmatist and PeterO

    Over 20 months on and this was still a hard one. Started on Saturday morning over breakfast where not many went in – curiously enough starting off with EYELESS (more from the Aldous Huxley book which was named from the line in Milton’s poem) and a few more in that SE corner. Eventually twigged to COOKIE as the last one in on Monday morning.
    Didn’t parse POSTIT correctly and couldn’t parse 24a, 2/13d and 7d at all. Did have the IN SE inside TRAT at 12a (eventually), but not the Latin version – IN (covered) and SE (as in IT-SE-LF).
    Tough, but with every clue justified and demanding one to unravel layers of thinking to derive the answer. ACT FOUR was classy and my favourite even though I had to skim the play to verify that there were at least four acts … and that he got ‘popped off’ in the third.
    Brilliant stuff …

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