A mid-week treat from Imogen …
… a typically meticulously clued puzzle, with a variety of clue types, ingenious constructions, some characteristically witty misdirection and excellent surfaces throughout.
I enjoyed working out 9ac TRIANGLES, 12ac WHEELIE BIN and 8dn SPANNER and grinned at the face trouble, the diverted train, the stark nude, the deceitful masseur and the writer in the bog. There’s mention of a theme in the G thread but I haven’t spotted one and I don’t want to delay the blog, so it’s over to you. I would be grateful for reassurance re my parsing of HERESY.
Many thanks to Imogen for an enjoyable start to the day.
Definitions are underlined in the clues.
Across
1 Starch silly person dropped into sparkling wine (7)
CASSAVA
ASS (silly person) in CAVA (sparkling wine)
5 Millenarian sect, mixers of cocktails (7)
SHAKERS
Double definition
9 Complicated relationships get Mr Big at intervals into difficulties (9)
TRIANGLES
TANGLES (difficulties) round mR bIg
10 In brief, ‘Academy’ leads with a vowel (5)
SCHWA
SCH (school – Academy – in brief) + W (with) + A
11 Clutching note, place bet (4)
PUNT
PUT (place) round N (note)
12 Woo-hoo! Born during overlong time in bed? Refuse to go there (7,3)
WHEELIE BIN
WHEE (woo-hoo!) + B (born) in LIE-IN (overlong time in bed)
14 I present The End of History, a cancelled opinion (6)
HERESY
This took some time: usually, HERE = ‘present’- but then what’s the I doing? – and I was looking for a word to take ‘a’ from, then two pennies dropped almost simultaneously: I think it’s HERE’S (I present) and that ‘a’ is part of the definition, a reference to cancel culture – I think
15 One exploiting employees making garment (7)
SWEATER
Double definition (for the first, Chambers has, for ‘sweat’, ‘to compel to do hard work for meagre wages’ ) – a beautifully apt surface
16 A small train diverted to Nancy? (7)
SINATRA
An anagram (diverted) of A S[mall] TRAIN – neat misdirection: we’re so used to Nancy guiding us infallibly to a French word
18 Confront a constant expense (6)
ACCOST
A + C (constant) + COST (expense)
20 Depression, given cereal that scours the teeth (10)
DENTIFRICE
DENT (depression) + IF (given – a change from ‘provided’) + RICE (cereal)
21 State of mind turning to horrible fate (4)
DOOM
A reversal (turning) of MOOD (state of mind)
24 Jazz work in theatre broadcaster half-heartedly takes on (5)
BEBOP
BE[e]B (BBC – broadcaster) minus one of the middle letters) + OP (work in theatre)
25 Stark nude changing clothes kept silent (9)
UNUTTERED
An anagram (changing) of NUDE round (clothes) UTTER (stark)
26 Came home missing river that’s changed channel (7)
RETUNED
RETU[r]NED (came home) minus r (river)
27 Police having time to replace cold headgear (7)
TOPPERS
[c]OPPERS (police) with T (time) replacing c (cold)
Down
1 Workers entering place for tea and slice (3,2)
CUT UP
TU (Trade Union – workers) in CUP (place for tea)
2 Seeing nothing wrong in being well-groomed (7)
SOIGNÉE
An anagram (wrong) of SEEING + O (nothing)
3 Face trouble, regularly stealing from balconies (4)
ACNE
Alternate letters (regularly) of bAlCoNiEs
4 Unearthly ordeal having to reorganise Dickens’ work (3,3,4,5)
ALL THE YEAR ROUND
An anagram (having to reorganise) of UNEARTHLY ORDEAL for this work of Dickens
5 Money temporarily put aside here for thriller? (8,7)
SUSPENSE ACCOUNT
Double definition
6 Want to save money, so giving up the booze (10)
ABSTINENCE
ABSENCE (want) round TIN (money) – I loved the surface
7 Show old horse a single piece of tack (7)
EXHIBIT
EX (old) + H (horse) + I (one – single) + BIT (piece of tack)
8 Bridge pair starting with spades concealing queen (7)
SPANNER
S (spades) + PR (pair) round ANNE (queen)
13 One writes new title and a couple of pages in the bog (4-3,3)
FELT-TIP PEN
An anagram (new) of TITLE + PP (a couple of pages) in FEN (bog)
16 Is about to exclude a feature of browser (7)
SIDEBAR
A reversal (about) of IS + DEBAR (exclude)
17 Tiny piece of high tech not fitting round a head (7)
NANOBOT
NOT round A NOB (a head)
19 Well up, holding firm in affliction (7)
SCOURGE
SURGE (well up) round CO (firm)
22 When starting masseur falsely said he had a magic touch (5)
MIDAS
M[asseur] + an anagram (falsely) of SAID
23 Not old, condescend to pack it in (4)
STOP
ST[o]OP (condescend) minus o (old)
14ac HERESY
We had “Here’s” (I present) “a y” (the end of historY), then removing (cancelled) the “a”.
HERESY
I had the same parsing as Eileen (I present Y=HERE’S Y)
Can anybody explain what sound a schwa is? I looked it up but all I can find is that it’s a mid vowel, which tells me nothing useful. I know it’s probably difficult due to different accents.
Make that three on Here’s Y
Lovely stuff today. I have to admit to being waylaid for rather too long in the east of France! 6d the only one I couldn’t parse, but it’s (of course) a very fair and a lovely clue.
ravenrider@3
It’s sort of a flat ‘uh’ sound (a very technical description, I know). Depending on dialect: the ‘e’ in ‘problem’, the ‘y’ in ‘vinyl’, the ‘o’ in ‘button’, the ‘e’ in ‘the’ when it’s not before a vowel.
A cancelled opinion = HERESY = “I present”, giving HERE IS, shortened to HERE’S. Plus the Y from end of history.
Fairly easy going, lots of write-ins, until the North East corner – I’d never heard of SCHWA (my LOI), had to use help to find it (the S_H_A crossers gave nothing that jumped out at me), and SUSPENSE ACCOUNT is also new to me for a temporary money account.
I also couldn’t parse ABSTINENCE so wasn’t sure if it was that or ABSTINENCY, but now I see it thanks to the blogger. Good to know money = TIN in crossword-ese.
We had SCHWA earlier in the year from Maskarade, when I first learnt the word. There was a subsequent one in a Quiptic. Thanks for the examples Tom @6.
I enjoyed this crossword more than yesterday’s. I liked HERESY, which I parsed like the others. I didn’t know the name of Dickens’ regular publication, but the anagram rather jumped out. Other likes included WHEELIE BIN, FELT-TIP PEN and SINATRA.
The whole puzzle was satisfying and there were various clues that I’d have struggled to get two years ago, so I enjoyed the feeling of progress.
Thanks Imogen and Eileen.
Tricky and enjoyable.
New for me: NANOBOT; ALL THE YEAR ROUND = British weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens; SHAKERS = millenarian sect (loi).
Favourites: WHEELIE BIN, TRIANGLES, ACNE, SPANNER.
I’m also a Here’s Y.
UPDATE TO #1 (my earlier comment)
I much prefer HERESY = “a cancelled opinion”, with “here’s y” as the wordplay.
Thanks Eileen (obviously) and #2, #4, #7, #8, #9.
Thanks Tom @6 for schwa examples. We also found a reference to the start and end “a”s in America as examples.
Really enjoyable. I liked MIDAS, WHEELIE BIN and TRIANGLES.
Beautiful puzzle with clever constructions. ABSTINENCE was the COD for me – such a brilliant surface. Good anagram for the Dickens magazine (which I suspect is much less well known than the novels which it serialised). ‘Starch’ for CASSAVA is a bit tangential – ‘carbohydrate’ would be a more usual synonym, though it would ruin the surface – but it didn’t hold me up.
Thanks to Imogen and Eileen
Woo-hoo! Exactly my reaction when I see Imogen’s name on a crossword and this one didn’t disappoint 🙂
Top ticks for WHEELIE BIN, FELT TIP PEN & the lovely misdirection in SPANNER
IO in the FT for anyone with any brain cells left
Cheers E&I
Had a good stab at this in the early hours, making good progress with only a half dozen unsolved in the NE corner. Then resuming just now, with my brain perhaps on a different setting, once I had convinced myself that SHAKERS fitted the bill for 5ac, the rest flew in. Couldn’t properly parse PUNT or HERESY, so many thanks for the explanations of those, Eileen. And to Imogen of course for a fine challenge…
I hear about schwas all the time in choir, when we are expected to sing on them in English texts, but that one still took me a while to suss out.
“Academy” starts with a schwa in my idiolect, so I thought that added something
Apart from an above average number of repeated letters in the solutions e.g. the ss in cassava, I can’t see a theme. And would that even constitute one?
Thanks to Eileen for the excellent blog and to Imogen for a good work-out in the mind gym.
Having determined to close Household Words and replace it with All The Year Round, Dickens cannily serialised A Tale of Two Cities in HW, bar the final instalment, which appeared in the first issue of ATYR, thereby creating a captive initial readership for his new magazine. On the same page as A Tale of Two Cities concluded, there appeared the first instalment of the new serial that D had chosen to help launch the new weekly, this being The Woman in White by his friend, Wilkie Collins.
I parsed SUSPENSE ACCOUNT as a CD rather than a DD as I couldn’t see how thriller on its own could work?
bodycheetah@20 – I agree: I did have a debate with myself about that one.
Very nice crossword, so thanks, Imogen and Eileen. (I can’t see a theme at all but that proves nothing.)
DonRogers@17
Agree. The clue reads like an extended def.
SUSPENSE ACCOUNT
I think we can interpret SUSPENSE ACCOUNT as a thriller (suspense story) whimsically.
Thank you Imogen and Eileen. Lovely crossword.
Was defeated by SOIGNÉE – but looking at the shabbiness of my T-shirt, I deserved to be!
Finished this last night because I was enjoying it so much. I mentioned my likes were WHEELIE BIN, SINATRA, DENTIFRICE and FELT TIP PEN but my standout clue was ABSTINENCE – what a wonderful surface. Thanks for the gen Balfour, your knowledge of Eng Lit is dazzling and makes me realise how much I have forgotten.
Ta Imogen & Eileen.
He makes me realise how much I never knew!
I couldn’t see a theme but I noticed that SINATRA is packed in a Nina of RAT.
Imogen is always welcome. Liked the WHEELIE BIN, HERE’S Y, ABSTINENCE (great surface) and NANOBOT. I failed to parse UNUTTERED (utter=stark?) and got held up for a long time trying to make bog=CAN fit into the FELT TIP PEN – I’ve been doing too many Pauls! Can’t see any theme: Imogen doesn’t often have one.
DENTIFRICE brought back memories if my childhood when a tin of this stuff was a feature of our bathroom.
A clever and most enjoyable puzzle. 13d was my most liked.
Thanks Imogen.
[Me @8 I was wrong about Maskarade, but Paul gave us a harder-to-solve SCHWA in January.]
Oops – didn’t finish my editing in time.
DENTIFRICE brought back memories of my childhood when a tin of this stuff was a feature of our bathroom. But I notice that the Science Museum can’t spell it.
Thanks Tom@6 for the explanation of what a schwa sounds like
Very enjoyable, though puzzled by CUT UP as I became fixated on TUC rather than TU as part of the cryptic fodder.
SCHWA was a write-in for me. Anyone familiar with people using English as their second language will have come across it, even if they don’t know the term. It does exist in other languages, but English is notorious for it.
poc@33
I have to defend my native tongue by pointing elsewhere: it seems to me that every other vowel sound (at least) in Bulgarian is a schwa!
Lots in Hebrew too, where one of the pointed vowels is so named.
An excellent puzzle with lots of great clues with clever surfaces.
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned that the surface of HERESY is clearly a reference to the essay “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, which put forward a view that I think even the author doesn’t hold any more (so “cancelled”).
Many thanks Imogen and Eileen.
Lord Jim @36 – many thanks for that.
A solid mid-week puzzle from Imogen. Thanks all.
I struggled with the NE corner before completing this. I liked the WHEELIE BIN for refuse, the BEPOP work in theatre, the good anagram for ALL THE YEAR ROUND, and the FELT-TIP PEN used in the bog. After the comments above, I looked again at ABSTINENCE and it is a very good clue.
Thanks Imogen and Eileen.
It took me a while to understand that I was being more than a bit dumb, after which this very enjoyable puzzle fell into place.
Regarding schwa: in addition to what folks have already said, in linguistics schwa is sort of the “minimal vowel sound” that other vowel sounds “decay” into over time when they are part of an unstressed syllable. In English it can be spelled with almost any vowel, or even none at all. It is the first ‘a’ in Canadian and the second ‘a’ in Canada (because of the stress patterns), the “invisible” vowel in the second syllable of “rhythm”, and the sound of “uh”, which is the commonest utterance in spoken English.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it is written as ə.
Very enjoyable puzzle. Writing in the first two across clues I thought it was going to be an easy one, but it turned out to be satisfactorily chewy. Lots of nice surfaces, of which my favorite was 22D.
Thanks to Imogen and Eileen
This was a game of two halves for me, with the LHS going in fairly smoothly and RHS proving knottier. I couldn’t parse ABSTINENCE but loved the surfaces for ACNE, SUSPENSE ACCOUNT (when I finally got it!) and FELT TIP PEN. In all, this was an absolute delight. Thanks Imogen and Eileen.
Jacob @41 Yes, from the bit of Linguistics that I did as an undergraduate 55 years ago, I remember it being represented thus, although I don’t think the term SCHWA was used. I learned that later, possibly from crosswords.
AlanC @25 You flatter me. There really are gaps in my knowledge, although I try to disguise these as well as I can. I did actually possess the entire run of A Tale of Two Cities through Household Words and into ATYR, which I bought in a junk shop in their tatty blue paper original bindings once for a pittance. When my students came to The Woman in White, I passed round that first issue of All the Year Round in a plastic folder opened at the relevant page. I sold it when I retired for – ahem- a slight profit.
Dentifrice is French for toothpaste. I didn’t know about the little red tin. Thanks to all.
“It crossed my mind for an instant that with a little thought one might throw together something rather clever about ‘Way down upon the soigné river’, but I was too listless to follow it up.”
BEBOP was one of the first in, but I was listening to Charlie Parker while doing the puzzle. It’s also a ‘jazz work’, a tune by Dizzy Gillespie.
Kva@23 yes that works too 🙂
Shakers are familiar to me, but it’s news that they’re millenarian. (Wiki gives a distinction between millenarianism and millenialism which is too complicated for me. I also learned that the original Shakerism, in England, was an offshoot of Quakerism.) There’s a former Shaker settlement near Old Chatham NY where I go from time to time, though I haven’t visited it.
Delightful puzzle. Thanks to Imogen and Eileen. Eileen, I’m horribly disappointed that you won’t be going to the Setters and Bloggers get-together any more, where I had hoped one day to meet you.
‘
[Valentine@49
I’m very disappointed too but somewhat mollified by having found out, just now, that, as last year, there’s a bus replacement service operating on all routes on that day – not starting until the afternoon and it’s a three-hour journey! – and so it would have been totally out of the question in any case, even if I had felt up to it. I hope you will make it one day – it’s a great opportunity to meet people you feel you know already and put faces to names. I’m sure everyone will have a great time, as always. 😉 ]
Had a nice time with this one, and agree with Eileen’s delightful preamble. Gentle for Imogen? Or do I just have my mojo back? Knowing a bit of French helped. I see 20a DENTIFRICE on my bilingual toothpaste tube all the time
Many great clues, as highlighted by Eileen. Other favourites 14a HERESY (for “I present” = HERE’S), 21a DOOM (love the word), 5d SUSPENSE ACCOUNT (“thriller”), 22d MIDAS (good use of “masseur”)
8d SPANNER, helped that we had PR recently
Many thanks Eileen and Imogen
Loved the completely unforced clueing. Sheer poetry especially where the surface is so apt! Eg., SWEATER. And several more.
Thanks Imogen for a wonderful composition and Eileen for an even more than normally elegant blog.
Thanks for the blog , very good set of interesting clues , will just mention SUSPENSE ACCOUNT as the only one I was not keen on .
MrEssexboy taught me about the SCHWA , I hope he returns one day .
IO Wednesday in the FT , if you have never beaten this setter there is a good chance today .
54 is the new 42 .
The theme is a special anniversary in Particle Physics , you need to apply the Isospin Opeator to all letters with bilateral symmetry to reveal the story of the Tau Lepton .
Nice puzzle, nice blog.
If you do a site search for SCHWA you’ll see it usually gets a bit of commentary whenever it shows up as an answer, but interestingly, it shows up more often in the comments.
Liked PUNT, FELT-TIP PEN, ABSTINENCE.
Roz@54: are you counting in base 13 now?
Thanks for the parsing of HERESY.
I thought the Swannee River might have a famous bridge to make a neat rhyme with SOIGNÉE but managed to correct myself.
[I prefer base 14]
Rich@57, see Phil Ramsden @46
I forgot to say that I totally agree with your comment on SINATRA, Eileen. For once Nancy in a clue is actually a person called Nancy! Brilliant.
I enjoyed that – chewy in places and yet solvable in one sitting. Like Roz@53 I also thought SUSPENSE ACCOUNT was a bit below par compared to the rest of the crossword.
Thanks to Eileen for the excellent blog.
Gladys@56 the ultimate question is – What do you get if you multiply six by nine ? – clearly using base 13 .
Lovely puzzle. First run through nada – had a SCAN (Senior Citizens Afternoon Nap) and hey presto all went in smoothly!
Why has “of tack” been included in 7D? The parsing and surface work fine without it.
I think this one supported my theory that Vulcan is getting a bit harder and Imogen is getting a bit easier. I’ll add to the praise for the whole puzzle, and for ABSTINENCE in particular.
CG@63: Indeed and that is presumably why it’s put in there – to add a level of complexity so we have to stop and think: ‘Of course a bit is a piece of tack as well as being a piece in its own right’. But it also helps the surface reading.
Mig@58, Phil Ramsden@46 I didn’t notice that post, I was referring to SPANNER but W/E being the pair.
Mandarin@64 it seems to be a general trend for the Guardian , perhaps just set as Spock .
Very satisfying solve, this, combining Vulcan’s elegance with some of Imogen’s deviousness.
Roz@61 You’d get the ultimate answer, of course, — but what then was the ultimate question?
Thanks both,
An accountant’s quibble: a suspense account is not a place you can put money. It’s an account in the bookkeeping system where unallocated debits and credits are parked pending resolution.
Learnt the nho SOIGNÉE today, which I got from the have-heard-of soigneur, which I know through its connection to cycling.
Thanks, both.
Haven’t had a chance to do any crosswords for a week and so this was a delight to come back to. Thanks Eileen for the parsing of SPANNER. And I now know what a schwa is.
Having never heard of All the Year Round, I assumed that ‘Dickens’ was a reference to the devil, and the devil’s work never stopping, and that there was a phrase to that effect.
Roz@54, I too initially considered that anniversary theme, but later concluded that Imogen was thinking of the now debunked wheelie bin heresy.