Usual excellent offering from Dac, solving time, 24 mins. I found SE quarter the toughest.
* = anagram < = reversed
ACROSS
1 HOPPING hopping mad – double definition
5 BAGH DAD “Bag”
9 POor ME GRAN ATE gran = nan
10 SOU(p) Proverbially small amount of (French) money ie bread.
11 ISSUE Double definition
12 FINANCIAL SECURITY Easy definition (in France, Italy, US, CI)*
16 M ASCOT m = mare is in Collins
18 GREE(n) CE EC<
19 TICKLISH SITUATION Cryptic definition
23 PINTA hidden
24 O(A)R
25 GLOVE PUPPET Cryptic definition.
27 TREADLE (altered)*
28 STEPS ON
DOWN
1 HIP (PIE) S &lit pi = very good (diminutive of pious, I think) – a quick look in dicts gives pie = pi in the sense of a mixture but not in that sense – I don’t have the ODE just now. Or maybe I’ve misread it all. (Thanks , NealH for explaining this below – comment 2 – my analysis took no account of the word ‘drug’ in the clue – I knew in my bones that Dac would have been most unlikely to have slipped up.)
2 POM mop<
3 IN G(a)LE
4 Steffi GRAF FIT (match) I (one)
5 John BRAINE “Brain” One of those writers who emerged with a new type of novel in the late 1950s Angry Young Men era.
6 GREEN BACK
7 DI ( S TIN) CTION s = son tin = can
8 DO (UBLE)T (blue)*
12 S (sugary topping – 1st letter) AC (HER TORT) E &lit ace = one tort = wrong (in a legal sense)
15 RE-CHARGED
17 GIANTESS (in stages)*
18 GO SPO(R)T
20 HEAR TEN The Top Ten
21 NI (CO)LE
23 PAUSE “paws” = handles clumsily
26 PAS means ‘not’ in French ie in the Moulin Rouge, famous dance venue in Paris.
1dn Yes, pi = good, from pious. Chambers has it less as ‘good’ and more as sanctimonious.
I think you did slightly misread 1 down. It’s actually an &lit of Hips around pi + E (E being Ecstacy of course). I thought that was by far the best clue.
I found this a bit easier than yesterday’s Virgilius, mainly because I’d heard of all the words, whereas yesterday had 3 or 4 that I’d never come across before.
…although I suppose if you were being really picky, you could say hippies pre-date Ecstacy and would be more into pot or LSD.
One from the Civil Service spelling test there, Neal: ‘ecstasy’ gets you the job.
As usual from Dac. There’s seldom much to say because it is all so simply good. I thought 1dn was quite brilliant — I don’t think the hippie-predating-ecstasy matter is a problem: in the clue he simply says ‘drug’, so the hippie need never have heard of E.
or would a proven familiarity with it, manifested by the correct spelling, make them shy away from the candidate…
Comment 6 refers to 4 – simultaneous arrival of 5 intervened.
I’ve always had a blind spot on the spelling of Ecstasy. It’s just not logical when most other words of that type end “acy” e.g. lunacy, surrogacy etc etc.
Just back from a festival in, by complete coincidence, 18 Across, which began on the day this puzzle appeared. We all have spelling blind spots and Ecstasy used to be one of mine until I discovered the anagram Stacey’s – you’ll always get it right if you check the number of esses.