Guardian 26,560 – Crucible

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I got off to a quick start in the NW corner, but then slowed down somewhat, even with the help of the useful 4d.

Quite an “arty” puzzle, with two writers and two painters (one of them from the CUBISTS). We have a link that’s not mentioned in the clues, with VAN GOGH’s SUNFLOWERS, and he also did a series of paitning of BUTTERFLIES. Any more hidden links? Thanks to Crucible

 
 
 
 
 
 
Across
1. IVY-LIKE Tree-hugging Eisenhower devoured Livy in translation (3-4)
LIVY* in IKE
5. PICASSO Is his art misanthropic, as some maintain? (7)
Hidden in misanthroPIC AS SO, and &littish – was Picasso’s work considered misanthropic?
10. ANTI Opponent fit to tackle the Greens? (4)
NT (National Trust) in A1 (fit). The NT are involved in conservation, of course, but I think defining them as “greens” is a bit of a stretch
11. PLUMB LEVEL Carpenter’s gadget pinhead left in chimney angle (5,5)
P[in] + L in LUM BEVEL
12. MOWGLI Medic with sick girl runs off to find 4’s child (6)
M.O. + W[ith] + GIRL* less R, for the boy in Kipling’s Jungle Books who was brought up by wolves
13. TARTRATE Paintings are picked up in gallery compound (8)
ART + R (“are” as heard or “picked up”) in TATE
14. THE BIG TOP He got pit renewed to accommodate Barnum’s first circus (3,3,3)
B in (HE GOT PIT)*
16. ABBEY Where various leaders of British Empire are buried? Yes (5)
Anagram of initial letters of British Empire Are Buried Yes, referring to those buried in Westminster Abbey
17. YEATS Guy turned to welcome English poet (5)
E in reverse of STAY (guy, as in guy-rope)
19. STICK ‘EM UP Rod and his bird start to protest: “Drop your gun!” (5,2,2)
STICK (Rod) + EMU (as in Rod Hull and Emu – hard luck, non-UK solvers!) + P[rotest]
23. SPEEDIER Second mole crosses ebbing river faster (8)
S + reverse of DEE in PIER (mole)
26. SUNFLOWERS Star declines to hug female occupants of bed (10)
F in SUN (star) + LOWERS (declines)
27. HUMP Take the end of August off to beat depression (4)
THUMP (beat) less [Augus]T – to have/get the hump is to be offended or in a sulk, not exactly “depression”, I’d say (though I see Chambers includes “despondency”, so maybe…)
28. NEW YORK Timeless web ringing Yankee city (3,4)
Y in NETWORK less T
29. ASTRIDE Riding apace (7)
A pace = A STRIDE
Down
2. VAN GOGH Artist‘s very excited about knight on horse (3,4)
V + N in AGOG + H
3. LYING Deceitful salesman evades answering (5)
REPLYING less REP (salesman)
4. KIPLING Top man secures first place for author (7)
PL[ace] 1 in KING
7,24,6. A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN 17’s line suggesting tours in Abbey should be organised (1,8,6,2,4)
“Tours in Abbey” is an anagram of BEAUTY IS BORN. The line is from Yeats’s Easter, 1916, commemorating the Easter Rising in Ireland on 24 April 1916. I think I vaguely knew it, but was held up by carelessly assuming that it was going to be by Kipling rather than Yeats
8. SWEETIE Pet‘s small (very small) and game (7)
S + WEE + TIE (game, as in “cup tie”)
9. JUST SO STORIES Fanatic jousts with Conservatives over singular work by 4 (4,2,7)
S in JOUSTS* + TORIES
15. BUTTERFLY Batsman’s opening, wholly in control of fine stroke (9)
B + F in UTTERLY
18. ESPOUSE Parisian art model entertains high-class champion (7)
The old trick of “thou art” = French “tu es” gives us ES, followed by U (high-class) in POSE (to model)
20. CUBISTS Former measures cramp society painters (7)
S in CUBITS
21. UNTAMED Fierce Unionist called to lash Tory leader (7)
U + T in NAMED
22. RIGOUR Trying to hurry occasionally creates hardship (6)
Alternate letters of tRyInG tO hUrRy – a word that reminds me of Peter Cook and the rigour of the Judging Exams
25. ABHOR Shrink from head office infiltrates a branch (5)
H.O. in A BR

41 comments on “Guardian 26,560 – Crucible”

  1. Thanks Crucible and Andrew

    I generally found this pretty straightforward, though the SE lingered a little. I didn’t parse VAN GOGH, but the solution was obvious; I also wrote in ANTI unparsed.

    I’ve said before that I dislike the “few crossers and word pattern” clues like 7,24,6, so I won’t repeat it (oh, I just did).

    I wonder how overseas solvers will get on with “Rod and his bird”?

  3. Thanks Crucible and Andrew

    Just one quibble.

    27 across could just as easily be sump (stump without the t) and a sump is a more convincing depression than a (or the) hump.

  4. I’m not sure I agree, Conrad – “take the end of August off” means “remove T from an end” – removing it from the middle would need “out of”.

  5. Though I (in Alaska) have never heard of Rod and Emu, it is a bird regularly used in constructing crosswords. Didn’t slow me down much.

    The “a terrible beauty is born” entry led me to reading the poem, then an analysis of the poem, then reading again. It’s one of the things I appreciate about these cryptics; not only do I (on a good day) solve the puzzle, but I (almost every time) learn some new term, interesting geography (e.g. yesterday’s manly Snaefell) or literature which I ought to have learned in college. Thanks Crucible and Andrew.

  6. Thanks, Andrew – and most especially for the Peter Cook reminder. [I could have commented ten minutes ago but had to listen to the whole of it, laughing all the way through. It’s made my day – I beg others to follow the link.]

    And another lovely puzzle from Crucible – beautifully constructed, with a range of great clues – favourite has to be STICK ‘EM UP! Many thanks to him, too.

  7. Thanks Crucible and Andrew. I made steady progress through this and enjoyed the vartiety of clue types and the breadth of references. The Rod & Emu connection went right over my head but I enjoyed the clue anyway.

    I came here for help on parsing 10ac and 27ac. I am afraid I still don’t get 10. I share your misgivings about NT being “the Greens” but even more puzzled as to how A1= Fit?

    And the Hump/Depression connection seems very tenuous to me. Perhaps Crucible enjoyed being clever by using a word usually considered an antonym as the definition, not so much fun for the solver, IMHO.

  9. Thanks Crucible and Andrew.

    A most enjoyable puzzle. I particularly liked PLUMB LEVEL (partly because LUM was a new word, Scottish, Northern English, for chimney, and not in the OCED, had to google) and ESPOUSE (the ‘Parisian art’ trick ‘tu es’ being also new to me).

  10. I thought this was an excellent puzzle, and that the clue for A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN was particularly good.

    Conrad@3 – yes, “sump” could be a viable alternative answer for 27ac, right up to the point the H checker from 25dn is in place. I got ABHOR first so didn’t have a problem with it, but I take it you put “sump” in first.

  11. Thanks Crucible, nice clueing but I don’t like quotations much. Either you know them and they are write-ins with a few crossers, or you don’t (like me) and it’s guesswork, although I should have twigged the reverse clue once I had guessed ‘A TERRIBLE.’

    Thanks Andrew for the blog, the Peter Cook link and for the parsing of VAN GOGH. I got my knickers in a twist (now, that’s a phrase I do know!) with that one, with ‘ah’ for excited and ‘gg’ for horse. Nicely hidden PICASSO. I liked STICK ‘EM UP and SUNFLOWERS.

  12. Thanks Andrew, for parsing ANTI for me. I guessed R=are in 13a, though I think it’s feeble. What on earth is LUM BEVEL?

  13. molonglo @12, see @9 for LUM (!), and a BEVEL is a slope from the horizontal or vertical in stonework or carpentry, a sloping surface or edge; think of a bevelled mirror, a mirror where the sides slant away for a centimetre or two all around the outside.

  14. I found this quite entertaining, but felt some of the indication a bit ‘compileritic’. I wouldn’t pick that out though, it’s just someone trying to be different. I liked 3d the best, but I had the following quibbles, as I tend to 😀 :

    5a sort of, not totally convinced; 10a doesn’t work; 11a ‘pinhead’ doesn’t mean P; 13a the R isn’t ‘heard’ like that; 27a HUMP is the opposite of ‘depression’ if you have ever driven in London; 7 24 6d why not use 16 instead of Abbey?; 9d I don’t like ‘fanatic’ even as the adj; 18d impossible to get ES in my opinion; 20d ‘cramp’ is wrong tense because, as a synonym is used, ‘former measures’ cannot be considered as a letter-string for the plural.

    HH

  15. I enjoyed this: easier than usual for a Crucible. However it was helped by the Just So Stories and A Terrible Beauty is Born which pretty much went in without thinking. I got very excited with Ivy-like, Mowgli and Yeats – was I on my way to discovering a pangram all by myself? No.

    Picasso misanthropic? I suppose if you think paintings of faces with the features rearranged, then yes.

    Thanks to Crucible and Andrew.

  16. Yes, Rod Hull and Emu was new to me, but the solution was clear and EMU as bird did click in. ANTI was also clear but I could not parse it; ditto for NEW YORK (I did not make the web-network connection), SWEETIE (I could not explain the TIE), and ESPOUSE (I missed the art-ES). I did know LUM from previous puzzles (maybe US ones) and the Yeats quote but still had trouble with PLUMB LEVEL because I kept trying to squeeze in variations on plumb bob or plumb line. Thanks to Crucible and to Andrew for the much appreciated parsing.

  17. Kipling’s poem ‘The Camel’s Hump’ uses hump for, if not clinical depression, at least, boredom induced miserableness.

  19. Yes Mike you can get the hump, but I’d always thought of it as irritation, or a (temporary) bad mood rather than depression.

    HH

  20. Thought this was very clever and enjoyed it a lot. Last in was the LEVEL in PLUMB LEVEL. Liked STICK EM UP, YEATS and A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN – the quote was vaguely familiar but I wouldn’t have known in was YEATS. Agree with Andrew that the NW corner was much easier than the rest.

    Thanks to Crucible and Andrew

  21. I’d been dallying, unconvinced, with KEATS at 17a but, when I got the quote (from a dimly-lit recess of memory), thought to Google it just to make sure.

    Otherwise, all was proceeding well in what seemed to be a relatively straightforward offering from Crucible until blocked in the SE. Had to get Mrs Trailman to check my offering of UPTIGHT at 21d (it works if you ignore the missing P) and was very relieved when a negative came back.

  25. One of Kipling’s Just So Stories was, of course, “How the Camel Got His Hump”. The camel apparently managed it by saying “Humph!” a lot. Indeed, he had the hump both literally and figuratively.

    This was tricky for me, but I almost got there in the end, failing on ABHOR. Liked the theme. ANTI does seem a bit tenuous.

  26. Possibly not the most convincing piece of evidence, but the American Heritage Dictionary does give

    hump 5 Chiefly British A fit of depression; an emotional slump.

    Hedgehoggy @14

    You say that in 20D, ‘cramp’ is the wrong tense. What do you think would be correct?

  27. There’s “The butterfly that stamped” in the Just-So Stories as well. (As well as that, “The beginning of the armadillos” explains how a hedgehog and a tortoise combined to form an armadillo – are there any tortoises around?)

  28. I think that Crcuible’s clueing is very polished. Favourites were STICK EM UP, VAN GOGH and ESPOUSE. Thanks to him and to Andrew.

  30. Bit embarrassed that I needed Google to get the Yeats quote, even after working out that the Across word was “beauty.” I’d read the poem in college, and again in graduate school, but I guess it fled my brain for some reason. Plus, I was looking for a forwards anagram, not a backwards one, and I had a bunch of leftover letters (from “should be”) that didn’t make a word.

    The one Yeats quote that has done the best job of sticking with me over the years is “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” That, and all of the wonderful stuff in “Sailing to Byzantium”:

    An aging man is but a paltry thing
    A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
    Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
    For every tatter in its mortal dress,
    Nor is there singing school but studying
    Monuments of its own magnificence;
    And therefore I have sailed the seas, and come
    To the holy city of Byzantium.

    ~~~

    Like others said, I didn’t need to know about Rod and Emu, since EMUs dance across American-style crosswords with regularity (as do practically all short words in which vowels outnumber consonants).

    I didn’t parse ANTI (I might have if the National Trust were defined as conservationists rather than greens) or PLUMB LEVEL, but once the checking letters were in, they really couldn’t be anything else. I also didn’t know that definition of HUMP–it is, after all, “chiefly British.”

  31. On the whole, I enjoyed this. Favourites are TARTRATE, STICK ‘EM UP, SPEEDIER, SUNFLOWERS, NEW YORK, LYING (we’ve all met some of those evasive sales staff, haven’t we?) and RIGOUR.

    I am somewhat dissatisfied with IVY-LIKE as IVY immediately leapt out from “Livy”, leaving very little solving to do. Also, I’m another who is not convinced about HUMP as “depression”. I couldn’t parse ANTI. If Andrew’s suggestion is correct, I don’t like that one either. A1 is fine, but although the NT care both about and for the environment, I too think clueing them as “Greens” is a stretch.

    I didn’t see “Parisian art” = ES, which was a new trick for this old dog. Annoyingly, I forgot to go back to (try to) parse UNTAMED, having been distracted by wanting to see what the arrival of the M did to 27a. The quote was new to me and my first attempts at parsing it failed (confusion as to whether “tours” or “organised” were indicators). Once I got YEATS and then guessed some parts (TERRIBLE and IS BORN), I found the full quote via web search, and only then finally parsed it.

    Thanks, crucible and Andrew!

  32. MrP @30

    Whatever the American Heritage Dictionary may say, posters here who I think are Brits seem to agree with me (also British) that HUMP indicates disgruntlement or sulkiness rather than “depression”.

  33. Thanks all
    Quite enjoyable although I couldn’t quite finish.
    Failed on rigour and anti.

  34. 7,24,6 is particularly good as Yeats was very involved with The Abbey Theatre in Dublin and did a great deal to promote it.

  35. We thought this was once more a lovely crossword by one of favourite setters (in all his guises).
    The clueing was somewhat ‘lighter’ than in the average Crucible, certainly not a drawback.

    Unlike others I/we liked “the Greens” for NT. Yes, perhaps a stretch but playful at the same time. The solution of 10ac had to be ANTI, so finding ‘NT’ shouldn’t have been a problem.
    Another definition that was imaginative was 1ac’s ‘tree-hugging’ for IVY-LIKE (strange word, btw, but it’s in the dictionaries).

    Luckily the long quote by Yeats was one of our last entries, otherwise it would have been over all too soon.
    A nice reverse anagram in which, I think, replacing ‘Abbey’ with ’16’ wouldn’t have been an improvement – it would uglify the surface.

    While I cannot see any objections against the R/are homophone nor against ‘hump’, HH has a point when he questions the use of ‘cramp’.
    To answer PeterO’s query on behalf of him: I think HH wants here ‘cramps’. Cryptically speaking it is not ‘A cramp B’ but ‘A cramps B’. However, as ‘A’ consists of two words it is probably justifiable.
    And ‘pinhead’ is not P? Well, I think that it is P. It’s a bit in the category of yesterday’s ‘Argentinian leader’. There, Paul was more or less accused of lazy clueing but I think he really sees this as valid. He does it all the time. His recent Mudd offering has another example of it but I cannot be much clearer as it is an FT prize puzzle. And today we had a ‘Tory leader’ too (in 21d).
    For me, it is (read: has become) a valid device even if I would like to avoid it myself if possible.

    I did wonder about ‘fanatic’ (9ac) as an anagram indicator but sometimes you accept things because ‘it feels like an anagram indicator’.
    Our first one in (PICASSO, 5ac) I found perhaps the least satisfying. If you take away the part needed for the wordplay, you’re left with ‘Is his art’ to contribute to the solution. I am not a big fan of these embedded definitions, not an &lit, not a semi-&lit either.

    But as I said at the beginning of this post, overall, a lovely puzzle.
    12ac, 13ac, 16ac, 19ac, 26ac, 28ac, 2d, 9d, 15d and 18d were our stand-out clues.
    Quite a lot!

    Many thanks to Crucible & Andrew.

  36. Sil, you are being pulled towards the dark side.

    What you might ask yourself is, ‘how easy would it be to shift any of these loose clues back into alignment’? And, ‘what percentage of personality apparently due to the setter would be lost in such a move?’. The answer, of course, to the first question is ‘very’, whilst to the second we can reply, ‘very little’.

    So why are you accepting what is there? Is it just because it IS there? I’m sorry, but you are a VERY naughty boy.

  37. Excellent and enjoyable puzzle by one of the best (and most prolific) setters in the game.

    Thanks to MP #17 and JA #25 for pointing out what some others were missing.

    Araucaria once based a couple of linked clues (as I recall) on The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo.

    These puzzles appear under the rubric “***Cryptic*** Crossword” – a tradition which sometimes includes (surprisingly) crypticness – which sometimes goes a little way (rarely far) beyond simple word-for-word substitution.

    Brings to mind another poem – one by Graves.

    Thanks for the blog Andrew.

  38. JS @37

    The objection to HUMP has nothing to do with missing the Kipling reference (which I did not miss – I love those stories). The camel in the story is idle, arrogant and grumpy, but he does not appear to be depressed. His idleness is deliberate, not due to the weight of a black cloud. He laughs at the animals which work for Man. He is proud of his straight back. Where does depression come into that picture? I don’t even see MP’s “boredom induced miserableness”. He is no less grumpy once he does start working for Man.

  39. Straightforward!? (Muffin @1) Combined forces here have only just limped to the finishing line. Can’t help agreeing with Paul B and the dark side, but cannot see what on earth objection to 20dn (SVDH, HH) where it appears to be the NUMBER of the verb at issue (they cramp or it cramps) rather than the tense – not being nit-picking HH, but as you put it, we thought you wanted ‘cramped’, ‘will cramp’ etc. But surely THEY (former measures/cubits) do indeed cramp S? Yes, it is a synonym, but a synonym can be plural surely? Is this some arcane rule of crosswords we didn’t know? Loved Parisian art!

  40. @jennyk #38

    I only had to go as far as Collins online to find:

    the hump:(British, informal) a fit of ***depression*** or sulking (esp in the phrase it gives me the hump)

    The asterisks and bolding are mine – but freely given.

  41. JS @40

    Oh well, as Collins has it I’ll give in gracefully on the use of “depression” in the clue, though that is not the sense in which I often hear it used over here. However, I still don’t think Kipling’s camel was depressed. 🙂

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