I enjoyed solving this one. As one who delights in witty, story-telling surfaces, I’ve sometimes despaired of some of Brummie’s but there are some really interesting pictures conjured up by some of these! There are one or two less familiar words but immaculately clued, so no problem.
The worrying thing is that this is a Brummie puzzle and Brummie does themes. TROTTERS made me wonder if we had an ‘Only Fools and Horses’ theme but it got me nowhere.
[Just as I typed that last sentence, HARLEM and GLOBE sprang out at me and I discovered that SWEET GEORGIA BROWN is the BASKETBALL team’s theme song. [And I think they wear KNEEPADS.] Phew! I don’t know enough about the game to pursue this further and I don’t want to hold the blog up any longer, so over to you for anything else.]
Many thanks to Brummie for an entertaining solve.
Across
9 Raw beauty at its core, on neutral ground (2,7)
AU NATUREL
AU [‘core’ of beAUty] + an anagram [ground] of NEUTRAL
10 Baron with line in chocolate? (5)
BROWN
ROW [line] in BN [baron] – the question mark indicates a definition by example
11 Foreign viceroy — not a chief in Kiev, anyway (7)
KHEDIVE
HE[a]D [chief minus a] in an anagram [anyhow] of KIEV
I thought I recognised this from O Level History but I can’t remember why
12 Village, or giant housing land? (7)
GEORGIA
Hidden in villaGE OR GIAnt
13 Railway: the regional torture! (5)
TRACK
T’ [northern ‘the’] + RACK [torture]
14 Put wad on a sporting match and laugh uncontrollably (4,5)
ROLL ABOUT
ROLL [wad] + A BOUT [a sporting match] – for too long I wanted this to be FALL ABOUT
16 Evidence of possession of muscles expanse I left to spread (8,2,5)
ABSTRACT OF TITLE
ABS [muscles] + TRACT [expanse] + an anagram [spread] of I LEFT TO
19 Take a look at all-female Ring Cycle opera (9)
LOHENGRIN
LO [look] + HEN [all-female, as in hen party] + an anagram [cycle] of RING – now that really is a nice surface
21 Chuck in backing, say, the theatre (5)
GLOBE
LOB [chuck] in a reversal [backing] of EG [say]
22 Cleric’s tight, transitive headband (7)
CIRCLET
Anagram [tight] of CLERIC + T [transitive] – used in dictionaries
23 Possessed large body, loathed clothing it (7)
HAUNTED
HATED [loathed] round [clothing] UN [large body]
24 Occupying thoroughfare to make water course (5)
SWEET
WEE [to make water] in ST [thoroughfare]
25 To perform a pop genre really badly could mean quite a stretch (6,3)
MURDER RAP
Cryptic definition – again, I spent too long searching for an anagram of A POP GENRE, chuntering to myself about the ‘superfluous’ ‘really’ : I should have known better – sorry, Brummie!
Down
1 Warm yourself before ballet movement, a competitive activity (10)
BASKETBALL
BASK [warm yourself] + an anagram [movement] of BALLET [or, rather, an exchange of syllables]
2 Guards keep sand out (8)
KNEEPADS
Anagram [out] of KEEP SAND
3 Star spewing out sulphur and then earth is not safe (2,4)
AT RISK
A[s]T[e] RISK [star] minus s [sulphur] and e [earth]
5 Instrument following toboggan line projection (10)
FLUGELHORN
F [following] + LUGE [toboggan] + L [line] + HORN [projection]
6 Unnatural boast about strangling old relative (8)
ABSONANT
Anagram [about] of BOAST round [strangling] NAN [old relative]
7 Consequently, river by grand house is a source of sugar (6)
SORGHO
SO [consequently] + R [river] + G [grand] + HO [house]
8 Former South American skincare product (4)
INCA
Hidden in skINCAre
14 Director shot Maine, which has never been bettered (6,4)
RECORD TIME
Anagram [shot] of DIRECTOR + ME [Maine]
15 Range of dumps accommodating virile blokes by day (3,7)
THE MENDIPS
TIPS [dumps] round HE MEN [virile blokes] + D [day]
17 Butterflies buzz and I propose we should (8)
RINGLETS
RING [buzz] + LET’S [I propose we should]
18 Racehorses go tailless ahead of fish-eaters (8)
TROTTERS
TR[y] [go] + OTTERS [fish eaters]
20 Henry Moore entrances overwhelming real fancy city neighbourhood (6)
HARLEM
HM [initials – entrances – of Henry Moore] round an anagram [fancy] of REAL
21,4 Refulgent, bursting with energy and so more tolerable to some? (6-4)
GLUTEN-FREE
Anagram [bursting] of REFULGENT + E [energy]
23,22 Playing card included in #realmoney (4,4)
HARD CASH
Anagram [playing] of CARD in HASH [#] – is the definition really one word? It appears that way both online and in my paper.
Thanks, Eileen. Well done for spotting the theme. I looked quite hard for one but couldn’t see it.
Isn’t 25ac a definition + cd?
Thank you Eileen. Enjoyed this but needed your help to parse a couple… And never see themes!
Thanks Brummie and Eileen,
ABSONANT was a new word for me, and not in my OCED. LOHENGRIN was a write in, but also a laugh.
I too, Eileen, wanted FALL ABOUT, but then realised a wad was a ROLL.
There seem to be quite a few words relevant to the BASKETBALL theme, for instance INCA, the people who are supposed to have invented the first form of it.
Thanks, Eileen
An enjoyable challenge; I had very few answers on first pass, but the puzzle yielded steadily. I found KHEDIVE in a dusty corner of the mental attic, but ABSONANT and SORGHO were new to me. So although they were clearly clued, the NE corner was the last to be solved, and BROWN my LOI (kicked self here!)
Some imaginative and entertaining clueing: I starred TRACK, LOHENGRIN, HAUNTED, SWEET (arf, arf), INCA.
‘Real money’ should indeed be two words, normally, but the clue for 23,22 is constructed to read as a Twitter hashtag.
Like Dave E, I made a (rather desultory) search for a theme, but without any success, so brava!
As Eileen says, an entertaining solve. Like Cookie, I’d never heard of ABSONANT (in Chambers if not in OED). I was another who pencilled in FALL ABOUT. Favourites were AU NATUREL, MURDER RAP and THE MENDIPS.
Thanks Eileen. Missed the theme but, despite the esoteric words, ran through this without much ado. Liked MURDER RAP. Just five days ago Puck had the sweet wee clue.
I thought some of these clues had a very unnatural order to them. Not a very satisfying puzzle, very clunky.
9a & 14a use ‘on’ unconventionally; 19a grammar is wrong, could have been corrected by using ‘see’ instead of the windy ‘take a look at’; 25a tense of def; 1d nounal ind; 8d not sure the indicator works hard enough; 23 22d an awful Guardianism.
Btw someone said the other day that ‘nounal’ is not a word: wrong! Of course it is.
Hoggy
14ac reminded me of the texting abbreviation ROFL (roll(ing) on floor laughing)
Thanks Eileen and Brummie.
Hard work today – took me longer than any for a while, but was determined to finish.
In 25a I think the definition starts with the word “could”. 23/22d was my favourite – of course “real money” is two words, but in this age of universal communication when anyone uses a hashtag in referring to or in an attempt to start a meme the words always run into each other. #iheartawfulguardianisms
Thanks Brummie and Eileen. Only got about halfway through, and despite having HARLEM, GLOBE and TROTTERS, I missed the theme.
GLUTEN FREE came easier than it might have done – in the print version, the phrase appears in large type in the advert opposite the crossword.
Hi Gervase @4 and Mitz @9
Thanks for the enlightenment. I don’t ‘do’ Twitter, so I’m not familiar with hashtags. ðŸ™
Excellent though missed the theme- I wondered if the # was a graunism until I sussed it. 25 was great.
Thanks Brummie, a bit of a slog with the difficult words but nice theme.
Thanks Eileen, perhaps female BASKETBALL players wear their hair in RINGLETS? 😉 There is a basketball player called Michael ROLL, but that’s probably just coincidence. I was another falling about without good reason.
I agree with Eileen that LOHENGRIN was the stand-out clue.
Robi @13, RINGLETS are used to attach the basketball net to the rim.
Thanks Eileen and Brummie
A fun puzzle. Absonant was my last in, once I saw that ‘nan’ was the old relative.
Favourites were Lohengrin, sweet and at risk.
Hedgehoggy @ 7. Nounal does seem to exist as you say, but substantival is I suspect more usual.
.
Re sorgho, I got this remembering seeing young African children sucking ‘millet’ stalks for the sugar they contained.
Thanks to Brummie and Eileen. I enjoyed it all, particularly 23a, and also entirely missed the theme.
One of the Globetrotters was Fred “Curly” Neal, though he didn’t have any hair, let alone ringlets.
Didn’t see the theme (I rarely do). New to me were SORGHO (which I got ) and ABSONANT (which I didn’t) – and I was another one to think it was FALL ABOUT. Also took me a disgracefully long time to get ABSTRACT OF TITLE given that I work for a solicitor and deal with them quite a lot.
Found this pretty tough to finish, especially ABSONANT which was new to me, as were CIRCLET and SORGHO. The NE corner took me as long as the rest of the crossword. Plenty to enjoy, notably HARD CASH, TRACK, MURDER RAP and THE MENDIPS
Thanks to Brummie and Eileen
Thanks Brummie and Eileen
I didn’t know SORGHO, but it was clearly clued and I had heard of “sorghum”, so it went in easily enough. ABSONANT was another new word – next to last in. LOI was SWEET, which became my favourite; LOHENGRIN also good.
I contrast to others, I thought the clue for MURDER RAP was the weakest in the puzzle – much too wordy, and an unsignalled Americanism as the solution.
I bet that the Mendips are chuffed to be called “a range”!
I must admit I looked at HARD CASH and thought “those Ximeneans will hate this one”, so certain comments above didn’t surprise me. The debate about nounal amuses me too, because I’m currently reading Peter Carey’s “True History of the Kelly Gang” in which adjectival is frequently used as a euphemism!
As with all Brummies, mind blank for a while and then it all fell into place. Loved the misdirection at 19a, and with a coeliac daughter 21,4 came easily even without the next door advertisement spotted by JA (memo to Guardian – if you are coeliac gluten-free is emphatically not a food fad).
Hoggy @7 and Tupu @15, ‘nounal’ definitely exists, it is in the OCED ( I can hear the groans, there she goes again with her old Oxford dictionary).
[btw Hoggy, you know the problem you have with accepting ‘take’ as an inclusion indicator, think of ‘take your medicine’, in ‘taking’ your medicine the pill, or whatever, goes inside you. Does this help, or am I missing something?]
Muffin @20: I firmly feel that setters are under no obligation to signal Americanisms (or Australianisms, or Canadianisms, or what-have-you). The solver is responsible for knowing the language—all of it. Or at least having the right reference tools to look up the bits he/she doesn’t know. Sure, it might be
helpful to know if a usage is part only of a regional dialect, but does it make it a bad clue if they don’t tip you off to that? I don’t think so.
Maybe I’d draw the line at Jamaicanisms, since that’s almost another language entirely. But no worries, mon.
~~~~~
In other notes: Kind of surprised that people here were nonplussed by the #hashtag, which has become #annoyinglyubiquitous on the internet these days—well beyond Twitter, now, although it did start there. I thought that made it a pretty clever clue, and thanks to the spacing it falls into the lift-and-separate category (with the hash as part of the wordplay, and the tag as the definition).
In response to myself, an exception might be if an American spelling (rather than usage or idiom) is wanted. Otherwise, a solver who confidently enters “centre” or “realise” when “center” or “realize” is wanted will have major difficulties down the road that are not really of his own making.
mrpenney @24
OK – but the clue is still over-verbose!
I would be intrigued to know just what you have to do to murder a rap (unless you remember Stephen Fry trying to improvise one…)
bh @27
Forget the words? Oh, no, you just make them up, don’t you?
(Years ago I was at a very traditional folk club when a floor singer decided to perform “Hard rain’s gonna fall”. He further annoyed the audience by announcing that he would make up the words if he forgot any.)
.. and further to nounal, adjectival etc., Peter Hammill wrote a song that used the word Lohengrinic and I’ve often wondered what he meant by that!
Yes well ‘take’ is not very good at saying what it means, Cookie. I agree that it can mean ‘include’, but it’s one of those words that makes life unnecessarily easy for the setter, I feel. I like indicators that really tell me what’s required.
I assumed ‘MURDER RAP’ was doing time for murder, someone had been ‘popped off’ is this correct?
Cookie, nearly—the rap is the conviction, not the sentence. So, you might say, “he’s doing 20-to-life on a murder rap.” The rap will show up on your rap sheet—i.e., your criminal record. And if you didn’t do it, you tell your cellmate that it was “a bum rap.”
I only know these things from the movies, mind you.
But BH @27 was asking how it is that you “murder rap” in the other sense, given that rap music by definition has no tune, so you can’t sing it badly. To which I’d say, you still need rhythm.
In 8, how does “product” mean hides or encloses? sorry for being so dim.
mrpenney, thank you. I see that ‘MURDER RAP’ also is slang for the worst type of rap, and it is said to be responsible for many deaths!
james g@33 – I don’t think it does, it just means that INCA forms part of “skincare”, in other words it is a “product” of it.
Sorghum is used by some brewers to make gluten free beers.
The late Kenny Everett did something called SNOT RAP some years ago. A rap well and truly murdered. Actually MURDER RAP was one of my favourites here.
I suppose this was OK. I found some of it hard work and I did find some of the clues a tad clunky. I didn’t spot a theme – indeed I didn’t really look for one. Strangely unsatisfying despite some good clues.
Thanks Brummie
To me, “take” says exactly what it means – whether or not the solver interprets it the same way is another matter. Cryptics rely on a certain amount of misdirection and ambiguity, and if a word can be an inclusion or a charade indicator, so be it. “Without” is another good one that can have more than one use in the wordplay.
As far as I can see, using Google, SORGHO is actually the French word for “sorghum”; I did find “sorgho” in Chambers, though.
muffin @39, sorgho is the name for sorghum varieties that are grown for syrup. I believe it is in Collins.
PS also for fodder and silage.
As one who frequently misses themes, I am chuffed to say that I spotted this one. On the other hand, I was willing to bet that nobody knew KHEDIVE: “a ruler of Egypt from 1867 to 1914 governing as a viceroy of the sultan of Turkey.” Impressive that some of you pulled that out of very dusty corner of memory. And necessary to cross the K in BASKETBALL. Good ‘un, Brummie.
Thanks Eileen. Missed the theme but, despite the exotic words, ran through this easily enough. Liked MURDER RAP. Just five days ago Puck had the sweet/wee clue.
Not much to add really.
I hadn’t heard of ABSONANT or SORGHO either.(neither has the spell checker 🙂 )
I found this difficult but rewarding as it was fairly clued.
Of course I didn’t see the theme. They have to be very obvious as I never look for them.
Thanks to Eileen and Brummie
P.S. james g @33
Coffee is a product of Brazil so it comes from Brazil
so if Inca comes from skincare it’s a product of skincare (I suppose)
Thanks all
Fortunately the theme passed me by.
I liked 19ac and 8down.
As several others have said absonant was unknown to me.
I also did not see the butterflies /ringlets connection.
RCWhiting @45
I’m really annoyed that I forgot to mention that I met the ringlet butterfly in this ‘Araucaria’ puzzle: http://www.fifteensquared.net/2014/11/26/guardian-26427-araucaria-and-friend/
Thanks Brummie and Eileen
A typically pleasant puzzle from Brummie which I only got to today – thankfully a Chifonie for today should allow a catchup.
The same new words applied to me as well as not spotting the theme. I did have trouble trying to find a dictionary entry for ROLL ABOUT, even though it had to be right.
The last couple in were HARD CASH and MURDER RAP, both of which I thought were very good after getting them.
Sorgho? I did know sorghum from a Chinese? film ” Red Sorghum” ?? Is that right?