The Monthly Digest

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,525 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 10)

This is Azed’s ‘Zager and Evans’ moment (probably only those of a certain age will understand that), and to celebrate he has come up with a plain that seemed to sit right in the middle of the difficulty spectrum – the letters to be shuffled in a couple of the anagrams were clear enough, but the required arrangements less so.  My ‘clue of the week’ is 13d.

14a Citizen of sultanate returning very soon? (5)
He or she will be coming back IN A MO.

20a English engraved in tablet for Irish-born writer (6)
No, not Tommy but Richard STEELE (E in STELE). Often considered one of the most important figures in the genesis of modern journalism, the Dublin-born Steele attended Charterhouse (where he first met Richard Addison), and Merton College, Oxford. He founded and wrote most of the content for The Tatler, published in London three times a week between 1709 and 1711, and then in 1711 with Addison launched the highly influential Spectator, which daily entertained thousands of Londoners in the capital’s coffee houses. It ran for 555 editions (each of around 2,500 words) with Addison providing the erudition and Steele the journalistic verve. He had something of a love-hate relationship with London, once describing it as a place where “Gamesters, Banterers, Biters, Swearers, and Twenty new-born Insects more, are, in their several Species, the modern Men of Wit”. He entered parliament in 1713 but was swiftly expelled for supporting the Hanoverian cause; on the succession of George I he was made supervisor of Drury Lane Theatre, and subsequently knighted. In 1722, financial problems forced him to retire to Wales, where he died in 1729. When the floor of St Peter’s Church, Carmarthen, was being levelled in 2000, Steele’s skull was found in a Victorian lead casket inscribed with his name. It had first been uncovered during excavations in the 1870s, and after it was reburied in the crypt no record of the site was kept. As John Mullan wrote at the time, “Its rediscovery tells us not so much of the indignity of being disinterred, as of having been forgotten in the first place.”

21a See this satellite go adrift round edge of space in cosmogeny (6)
Not exactly a composite anagram, but a very similar construction: the letters of the solution (‘this satellite’) plus GO when rearranged (‘adrift’) around E (‘edge of space’) can form COSMOGENY.

31a Song name: ‘Born when it’s springtime in Britain’ (5)
A four-letter word for a song and a one-letter abbreviation for name combine to produce a description for someone (like myself and both of my parents) born between 21 March and 20 April.

4d Bird arranged twig to tidy up nesting (6)
A nice ‘tight’ clue, where an anagram (‘arranged’) of TWIG has a two-letter word meaning ‘to tidy’ reversed (‘up’) inside (‘nesting’). I’m not sure whether ‘nesting’ can strictly speaking be ‘tidied up’, but I don’t think we need dwell on the matter.

8d Glen, David or Jonathan dropping by? (6)
Or Josceline, or Richard, who gave his name to the series of annual television lectures which started in 1972 with Lord Annan posing the question ‘What are Universities for, Anyway?’ Their shared surname is losing the letters ‘by’ at the end (‘dropping by’) to produce a dialectal word for a dell or a dingle.

10d Smash witnessed – hassle separating parts (10)
A four-letter word for ‘witnessed’, the parts of which (specifically the first letter and the last three letters) are being ‘separated’ by a six-letter word meaning ‘hassle’ or ‘confuse’.

13d Newspapers on ER getting out of herself, uplifted to meet the people (10, two words)
A nice clue, with the PRESS followed by (‘on’) HERSELF without the ER (‘ER getting out’) reversed (‘uplifted’).

19d I’m served in the manner of the bargeman’s wife, mustily dressed (7)
A simple anagram of MUSTILY, but a definition that shouts (or would, if it had the gift of vocalization) ‘Azed’: the term à la marinière can be loosely translated into English as “in the manner of the bargeman’s wife”.

23d Keep quiet about debt settlement in historical bailment (6)
To avoid a dictionary scan one needs to know that UTU is a Maori word for ‘recompense’. Surrounding it is the interjection MUM, ‘Keep quiet[!]’.

24d Ride bicycle when damaged: dicey and thus punctured (6)
A composite anagram where the letters of RIDE BICYCLE when rearranged (‘damaged’) can produce DICEY plus the solution (‘thus punctured’).

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,524 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 10)

This one seemed to have taken me slightly longer than last week’s, so initially I awarded it an extra half-blob for difficulty, putting it right in the middle of the spectrum for plain puzzles. On reflection, this seemed an overstatement of its toughness, so I have reduced its rating to be the same as last week’s. My ‘clue of the week’ is 11a.

11a Polish, like one of my lovers, might one suppose? (4)
A neat clue that has Azed written all over it. George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) had many liaisons, one of them a protracted and often troubled relationship with the Polish-born composer Fryderyk Franciszek (aka Frédéric François) Chopin.

29a Shakespearean heroine surrendering most of plume for hempen plant (4)
The Shakespearean heroine (though one who receives comparatively little stage time) is CRESSIDA, and the plume which she is largely surrendering is a CREST. Troilus is briefly mentioned by Virgil in Book I of the Aeneid (I only read Books II and XII at school – they were considerably more fun than our Greek set book, Xenophon’s Anabasis, which spent far too long describing the minutiae of a military expedition, such as precisely how many jars of oil they took with them, for my liking), but his story was subsequently built up in mediaeval times and Cressida (or Criseyde) introduced. The tale goes something like this: during the Trojan War Troilus, son of the Trojan King Priam, takes a shine to Cressida, a young Trojan woman. Things go swimmingly between them until Cressida’s dad makes a sudden switch to the Greek ranks, taking Cressida with him. Although Cressida has vowed loyalty to Troilus, she two-times him with a  Greek soldier named Diomedes. To put the tin hat on it, Troilus is murdered by Achilles for allegedly calling him a ‘heel’. In the words of Viv Stanshall, “Sometimes you just can’t win.”

30a Scraping away seed stops weed coming back (9)
‘Stops’ here is being used in the sense of ‘plugs’, so this is a five-letter word for seed ‘plugging’ a four-letter word for a biblical weed (or a vetch of various kinds) which has been reversed (‘coming back’).

31a Significant number in the country, not English (4)
The country is the STATE, from which E (English) has been removed, producing an informal term for the sort of significant number with which those watching the Sky coverage of this year’s Indian Premier League have been relentlessly bombarded (one from today: Aaron Finch has advanced down the pitch to seam bowlers 28 times during this year’s IPL as against 23 times in all previous tournaments…that’s, er,  absolutely fascinating).

1d Mixed bevvies, only half taken up? What’s the point? (4)
CUPS are mixed beverages, and when just the second half of the word is reversed (‘taken up’) a word meaning ‘point’ is produced.

3d Chaps I left about to fasten up proposed piece of US legislation (8, two words)
A reversal (‘up’ once more) of MEN I L (‘Chaps I left’) around TIE (‘to fasten’); I’m not sure that the solution is a ‘piece’ of legislation in the accepted sense, rather an element of a piece of legislation, but I suppose a piece of a piece is still a piece, yes?

5d Pharmacists are contemptuous of allowing poet in (10)
A three-letter slang term meaning ‘treat with disrespect’ containing the seven-letter surname of an Elizabethan poet beloved of setters of barred puzzles and thus well known to solvers of same.

18d Bracts, not those mostly seen after spring (7)
That handy three-letter word which can be succinctly indicated by ‘spring’ or ‘well’, followed by THESE (‘not those’) missing the last letter (‘mostly’).

23d Unruly kids, pair latterly misdirected, broke out up north (5)
A similar construction to 1d, in this instance it is the last pair of letters in BRATS that is to be reversed (‘misdirected’). When Matt Groening gave names to the members of the Simpson family, he used those of his own family members (his parents, Homer and Margaret [née Wiggum], and two of his sisters, Lisa and Maggie) for all except Bart, on whom he conferred an anagram of ‘brat’ rather than Matt. The character is supposedly based (loosely) on Matt and his older brother, Mark. The name of his other, older, sister? Patty.

27d Head sounds like an ass to audience? (4)
Thankfully Azed does not frequently use homophones, and when he does they are always supported by the pronunciations given in Chambers. I’m no expert on animal sounds, but I tend to think of an ass hee-hawing or braying, with neighing being more the domain of the horse.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,523 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 10)

This one didn’t last beyond my second slice of Toastie, but I felt that there were enough obscure words to justify a difficulty rating only a little below average for a plain Azed.

24a Lacking ice, a fruit drink to skip? (5)
Quite a nice &lit, the cryptic reading indicating JUICE (‘a fruit drink’) with ICE removed (‘lacking ice’) followed by LEP (a dialectal form of ‘leap’, ie ‘to skip’), and the surface reading giving a pretty fair indication of the solution. Incidentally, the alternative parsing where ‘ice, a’ are removed from JUICE and LEAP respectively is ruled out for me by the punctuation.

26a Have a rinse up north in basin with 14 (4)
I can’t recall ever seeing this construction in an Azed puzzle before – a ‘hidden’ where the solver is required to replace a reference to another clue with the solution to that clue in order to complete the hiding place.

28a Better rooms round bishop’s place, furnished in the old style (6)
At one time many houses in Scotland and Northern England had a single entrance leading into the kitchen (which was ‘but’ the house, or towards the outside). From here one would enter the parlour (‘ben the house’, ie towards the inner part, so known as the ‘ben’), and in a three-roomed house, one would pass through this to reach the inner chamber or bedroom (the ‘far-ben’). So how ‘ben’ you were invited to go into someone’s house reflected the intimacy of your relationship with the occupier. Here the BEN is surrounding the bishop’s office to produce an obsolete adjective meaning ‘furnished’.

32a Much-abused princess, one appearing in Hamlet? (5)
The question mark is there to show that Hamlet is just an example of a DANE, into which the letter A must be inserted. The princess in question could certainly have held her own in the company of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen (“..and if you tell that to the young people today, they won’t believe you.”). As so often, things started to go wrong when her dad (Acrisius) consulted the oracle who gave him the bad news that he was going to be killed by his daughter’s son. Since at that point she had no offspring, he entombed her in a bronze chamber lacking doors and windows, which must have seemed like a pretty safe bet, but he had reckoned without Zeus’s innovative insemination techniques, in this instance involving a shower of gold. Having given birth to a son, Perseus, Danae then found herself shut in a chest with him and cast into the sea. Things improved for her after that, and Perseus went on to be an all-round good egg (decapitating Medusa, rescuing Andromeda etc) who showed slightly less prowess at javelin-throwing, unfortunately for his grandfather.

1d Floral spikes grooms fixed round soft saddle (8)
A generous dollop of uncommon words or meanings here: the grooms are SICES (‘sice’ being an unusual alternative spelling of ‘syce’) and the soft saddle fixed inside is a PAD.

2d Alternative to crystal ball? Rating satisfactory (5)
A slight trap here for the unwary – the set of cards used for fortune-telling is usually seen as a ‘tarot’, but that doesn’t fit the wordplay, the rating being a TAR and ‘satisfactory’ being OK, so the solution is one of the alternative spellings (of which ‘taroc’ is another). Hands up anyone (besides me) who remembers the excellent children’s TV series Ace of Wands from the early 1970s  featuring Tarot (a stage magician with supernatural powers, played by Michael MacKenzie) and his pet owl Ozymandias (played by Fred Owl).

4d Cyclist round Germany? One employs cogs regularly (8)
I’m not sure why Azed didn’t write this as ‘going round’ or ‘travelling round’ rather than ’round’, which would surely have improved the surface reading, but at least he didn’t use ‘touring’, which I refuse to accept as a containment indicator. A seven-letter (informal) word for a cyclist surrounds the D for Germany, and a ‘cog’ is a trick or deception.

18d One known for rambling, with less and less on top (7)
Clare Balding is the host of Ramblings on BBC Radio 4, where she ‘joins notable and interesting people for a walk through the countryside’. The programme has been running since 1999 and is now into its fortieth series.

21d Heat and leave simmering? Have a ———, not overcooked (7, two words)
A composite anagram, where the letters of HEAT AND LEAVE when rearranged (‘simmering’) can produce HAVE A plus the solution, the definition being ‘not overcooked’. But in a clue like this when the blanks are replaced by the solution the whole thing should make some sense, and here it doesn’t.

25d Five hundreds? Twice that, with rest to follow (5)
A neat clue. Twice five hundred is a thousand, ie M, and if you follow it with a word for ‘rest’ you get a measure for five ‘hundreds’ of herring, such a ‘hundred’ being anything from 100 to 130, probably depending on whether you’re buying or selling.

27d Historical wimple come to light, without red binding (5)
I don’t think that ‘come to light’ can reasonably equate to ‘revealed’ (the former has an active sense and the latter a passive sense), but here it is expected to, and it’s having the letters RED on the outside (‘red binding’) removed.

28d Sound of horn number one one tone above tuning note, rising (5)
PEE (‘number one’) and B (‘one tone above tuning note’) are being reversed (‘rising’), but if this clue read any worse it would be illiterate. Which puts me in mind of the moment in the film No Surrender where the club bouncer (brilliantly played by Bernard Hill) who has just thrown out some customers because of the way they looked is told that no-one should judge a book by its cover, to which he replies “I do. I can’t read.”

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,522 ‘Carte Blanche’

Difficulty rating: (4.5 / 10)

I’ve never been a great fan of the ‘carte blanche’ puzzle unless there is a theme which justifies it – to make a plain carte blanche crossword you simply take a normal plain crossword and remove the bars and (unless you’re feeling very generous) the enumerations…job done! And given the amount of cold solving (ie solving without knowing any crossing letters) of non-enumerated clues that is required, the clues themselves have to be kept pretty simple, which tends to make them less entertaining. Apart from that, it’s a great type of puzzle. Anyway, in the words of Adam Ant, ridicule (or possibly Liverpool, I could never be sure) is nothing to be scared of, and the same applies to this puzzle. It did take me a little longer than an average-to-tricky ‘plain’, hence the difficulty rating.

I solved the first and last across clues along with the first two down clues, which allowed me to put the ‘frame’ into the grid. Working through the next few down clues enabled me to complete the perimeter and hang a few more stalactites from the top row, and I worked on steadily from there.

For those who would like a little help with the enumerations, they are as follows:

Across: 9 (two words), 6, 5, 9, 5, 7, 9, 5, 5, 9, 7, 5, 9, 5, 6, 9
Down: 11, 4, 7 (hyphenated), 4, 7 (hyphenated), 11, 4, 7, 4 (two words), 7, 11, 7, 7, 7, 7, 4, 4, 4, 4

The first across entry follows four barred-off cells, ie it is aligned to the right edge of the grid, hence the entry on the bottom row is aligned to the left.

Across Clues

Aid to east-west understanding I block before heading westwards (6)
This is I plus a three-letter word meaning ‘block’ or ‘squeeze tight’ plus an archaic two-letter word for ‘before’, all reversed (‘heading westwards’), the whole being a system for writing Japanese using the Roman alphabet.

Jock’s cautious, with being written out of score (6)
A six-letter word for a score in the numerical sense that has had the W (with) removed (‘written out’).

Gypsy fellow with a young salmon hiding inside dense thicket (9)
This is CHAL (‘Gypsy fellow’) with A PARR (‘a young salmon’) hiding inside, producing a solution which instantly brings to my mind the 1960s TV series The High Chaparral, which started out as a kind of Arizonan Dallas with added Apaches, but over time became a lot more amusing in an intentional way.

Carrion feeder, usually preferring gall to heart (5)
USU (an abbreviation for ‘usually’), with its heart (central letter) being replaced by a three-letter word meaning ‘to gall’ or ‘to chafe’.

Roy and Dennis maybe joined in secret palavers (7)

The ‘Roy’ is the late, great Roy Hudd, while the ‘Dennis’ is Les Dennis. Roy Hudd was brought up by his grandmother, who took him to the local variety theatre every Friday night. He was captivated by the musical halls, and became an authority on their history; his stage show in which he looked back over his life and career featured many songs and monologues from the halls, and I remember him saying that one of the first songs that his granny had taught him was The Hole in the Elephant’s Bottom. Well, it makes a change from Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and that kind of tosh. The first two verses go something like this:

My ambition’s to go on the stage
And now you can see that I’ve got on.
In the pantomime I am engaged
To play the elephant’s bottom.

Now the girls all think that I’m it
When they sit in the stalls I can spot ’em
And I wink at the ones in the pit
Through the hole in the elephant’s bottom.

Down Clues

Wheeze according to Sandy spattering end of hankie (4)
JAP is a Scots word meaning ‘a splash’ or ‘a spattering’, and the end of ‘hankie’ is an E.

A people in plains adjusted according to theories of philosopher / physicist (11)
This is an anagram (‘adjusted’) of PLAINS containing A plus a four-letter word for a ‘people’, and while the word ‘physicist’ is not strictly speaking erroneous, the chap (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) who gave his nom de guerre to the adjective is described by Chambers as ‘philosopher and physician’. His slightly more catchy monomial was probably an anglicization of ‘Hohenheim’ which his friends in France came up with.

S. Asian tree obscuring sun for grain crop (4)
The tree in question is the SUNDARI; unless you are familiar with this or the variant spelling of the grain crop then this is probably going to be one of the last clues that you solve.

Lass yields to pass if this – it makes miss sound like a legend! (4)
This clue bears some resemblance to Azed’s classic “My letters could make lad sad” for LASS, but here ‘lass’ becomes ‘pass’ if L IS P, and ‘miss’ pronounced with a lisp sounds like ‘myth’. Not quite in the same league as its illustrious precursor.

Pair of duck changing over to Scottish loch – something for oriental-style pan (4)
Two wordplays here, one involving changing over the EA in the middle of the name of a type of duck for AE, and the other involving a Scots form of ‘to’ being followed by L (loch). The whole is a Chinese weight much beloved of crossword setters for that ‘ae’ at its centre, the ‘pan’ being the sort found on a set of scales.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,521 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 10)

An entertaining puzzle, and a competition clue word almost sufficiently enticing to tempt me out of retirement – but not quite. Although this puzzle didn’t last long past breakfast, I felt there was enough trickery in there to justify a mid-range (for plain puzzles) rating. An Azed trademark that was in evidence today was the use in the clues themselves of uncommon terms such as ‘dam’ (1d) and ‘budget’ (3d) which share a spelling with a more familiar headword.

12a Village abroad? One making return journey as reminder (4)
The village ‘making a return journey’ is DORP, a Dutch/South African village or town which, according to Chambers, is rather appropriately ‘considered as backward’.

18a Revolutionary, executed maybe protecting his leader, brittle when heated (8)
RED (‘Revolutionary’) combines with SHOT (‘executed maybe’) around (‘protecting’) R (‘his leader’, ie the first letter of ‘Revolutionary’) to produce a rather fine word that I don’t recall coming across before; Azed manages to work a somewhat intractable definition into a clue that reads well. The slightly more prosaic ‘hot-short’ has a similar meaning when used to describe iron which contains an excess of certain impurities, while there is a parallel term ‘cold-short’, which when applied to a metal means ‘brittle in its cold state’.

27a What’s uprooting wort from historic field? Rats! (4)
What do you get when you remove (‘uproot’) WORT from BOSWORTH, the field which hosted a Lancashire-Yorkshire derby in the summer of 1485? Chambers only gives the interjection ‘rats’ as an expression of irritation or annoyance, which would not satisfactorily indicate the solution here, but OED offers “used ironically in plural to express incredulity: ‘humbug’, ‘nonsense’.” for ‘rat’, so it’s fine.

28a One playing around with characters, a feature of moral philosophy (5)
RALPH (hidden in the clue) is an imp who inhabits newspaper printing offices. These days he’s certainly better known to crossword solvers than to any other demographic group, printers included. The origin of his name appears to be shourded in mtystery, but William Savage’s Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1841) tells us that ‘Every chapel is haunted by a spirit, called Ralph. When any man resists the decision of the chapel, and it is determined to enforce it, Ralph, or the spirit, is said to walk; and whatever mischief is done to the resisting party to enforce submission, which is always performed secretly, is invariably imputed to Ralph, or the spirit.’ Albert Barrère’s Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (1897) tells us that “A man is ‘sent to Coventry’ if he dares to defy the decision of the chapel, and many tricks are played on him by his companions in consequence.” Any information on how the imp acquired his name would be appreciated.

Incidentally, a “printer’s devil” was the errand-boy in a printing office, or sometimes the youngest apprentice (boy or girl), and the term seems to have separately become associated with printing errors, but as the result of inexperience rather than intimidatory mischief-making. A number of famous authors apparently served as printer’s devils in their early days, including Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman…and Ambrose Bierce, who will no doubt make futher appearances on these pages.

The multi-talented author Denys Parsons (grandson of Herbert Beerbohm Tree) in his collections of misprints such as Funny Ha Ha and Funny Peculiar preferred to ascribe errors to a shady character called Gobfrey Shrdlu. The first two columns on a linotype machine contained the keys ETAOIN and SHRDLU; when an error had been made in a line, the machine operator would typically type these letters repeatedly to fill out the line, indicating to the proofreaders that the line should be identified for deletion prior to printing. Sometimes, however, this deletion did not occur, and Gobfrey’s signature ‘etaoin shrdlu’ would appear on the printed page. The arrangement ETAOIN SHRDLU was chosen based on compositors’ views of the frequency with which individual letters appeared in publications; the number of times that certain words such as ‘the’ are repeated in printed works means that this sequence is somewhat different to that which is applicable to dictionaries,  usually given as EARIOT NSLCU (but it all depends on whether you choose to include derived forms such as plurals, participles etc in the tally).

30a Feature of shores, lacustrine or palustrine? This splinter possibly (4)
A composite anagram which contains rather too high a proportion of excluded letters (8 of 12) for my liking but which has a certain je ne sais quoi. The letters of SPLINTER plus the solution can be rearranged (‘possibly’) to form OR PALUSTRINE; the definition is ‘Feature of shores, lacustrine’.

33a A cause son’s abandoned in part of city? (4)
SON here is abandoning A REASON (‘a cause’) to produce a word given by Chambers as meaning ‘part of a building, city, etc designated for a special purpose or character’.

1d Fundamentally strengthen e.g. dam, dry, protected by spar (12)
The ‘dam’ here has nothing to do with barrages, but is dam⁴ in Chambers, an obsolete COPPER coin. The remainder of the wordplay sees TT (‘dry’) being ‘protected’ by BOOM (‘spar’).

3d Budget? Chancellor’s last cut initially in the bag (5)
And again here, despite what the surface of the clue might have you believe, the ‘budget’ is budget², a fixed RUDDER on a barge, from which the last letter of Chancellor (“Chancellor’s last”) must be removed (‘cut’). There are solvers out there who believe that “Chancellor’s last” should indicate S. They are wrong.

6d Sitar player getting into first half of raga soaring rapturously? (6, 2 words)
The sitar player who is getting into RA (‘first half of raga’) reversed (‘soaring’) is the late RAVI (Ravindra) Shankar, the master of the instrument who, unlike Joni Mitchell, actually managed to make it to Woodstock.

7d Youngster mounted on pre-eminent stallion maybe presenting rodeo challenge (7)
A neat clue, with CUB (‘Youngster’) reversed (‘mounted’) above KING (Chambers: ‘a man or other male animal who is pre-eminent among his fellows’).

19d Hammer maybe decapitated copy in gutted engine (7)
Not too many physical CARBON copies around these days, and I wonder how many email users who are cc’ed on a message know that they are receiving an electronic one. The word is losing its head (‘decapitated’) and being enrobed in the first and last letters (‘gutted’) of ENGINE. This particular bone is known in England as the malleus, and north of the border as the malleus Scotorum.

20d Snuffs to sprinkle without getting up (6)
Not the easiest wordplay to make out, being SET (‘sprinkle’, as in ‘stud’) SANS (‘without’, as in ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’) reversed (‘getting up’, as in, well, ‘getting up’).

25d Knight e.g. displaying distinctive character, following Lancelot’s lead (5)
The reference is to Dame Laura Knight, the pioneering British artist probably best known today for her informal portraits of performers, most notably those from the worlds of ballet and circus.

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,520 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 10)

I felt this one was right in the middle of the difficulty spectrum for plain Azeds – one ‘hidden’, one other clue where the solver didn’t have to look beyond the clue itself, and  a variety of other clues ranging from the straightforward to the fairly tricky. Not as many clues for me to take issue with as last week, but I still managed the odd quibble. Note that (in the online version at least) the clue for 5a is incorrectly numbered as 9, and the enumeration for 13d should be ’10, two words’.

14a Craggy height, one with blunt and notched tip you’ll find us avoiding (5)
Dangerously close to a clue where both the solution and an element of the wordplay are uncommon words, but the construction is neat and anyway the solution is something of a staple in barred puzzles, so I’m not going to dwell on it. To get the answer you need to combine A (‘one’) with RETUSE (‘with blunt and notched tip’) and remove US (“you’ll find us avoiding”).

19a What WI members share, pork pie with fish? Reverse of ‘Yum’ welcomes that (10)
As Ira Gershwin might have put it, ‘Nice word if you can get it’, and you can get it if you put LIE (‘pork pie’) and BRIT (‘fish’) inside YUM reversed.

23a One strong drink I refused for another (4)
Very similar to 14, and again two uncommon words are involved but the solution will be no stranger to regular solvers – as in 14, we have A (‘One’), this time followed by RAKI (‘strong drink’) with the I removed (‘I refused’) to produce a word for another [strong drink].

27a Ungainly lass given bits of wood for old-style folk dance (7)
Enough already with the obscurities leading to an obscurity! Here the ungainly lass is a MOR (a vocative form of ‘mauther’ not given by the OED) and the bits of wood are RICE, the obscurity of the whole being excusable on the grounds that the alternative spelling will be familiar to all solvers.

32a Raise tax in completion of Robert’s designation?(6)
If I’d spotted this clue across a crowded room I’d have known it was one of Azed’s. VAT (the ‘tax’) is contained by ‘E. LEE’, the completion of American Confederate general Robert Edward Lee’s normal designation. His demise in 1870 must have been poorly publicised, since Judy Garland was still waiting for him in the 1940s.

4d Window-frame: make some changes to home with this (4)
Another clue bearing the Azed trademark (though not, I hope, copyright – I’ve written a few similar clues myself) – you can make SOME change to HOME with S AS H.

6d Is he out of wits erring with letters out of order? (10)
OK, perhaps it’s a little bit clunky, but Azed’s constructional skills are evidenced here – it’s one thing for a setter to spot the anagram potential of WITS ERRING, but to work it into a sound &lit clue (where the whole clue stands as the definition of the solution) is a far tougher task.

8d Like polished silver set interspersed with precious stone (6)
The letters of LAY (‘set’) are regularly interspersed with those of GEM (‘precious stone’).

9d I don’t care for particular suits showing characteristic radius round bottom (9)
This is nice, NOTE ‘characteristic’) R (radius) going round RUMP (‘bottom’) to produce a hyphenated word which Chambers is helpful enough to define as ‘someone addicted to calling no-trumps’.

21d End of talks held up midway? Sage may suggest this alternative (7)
Does the wordplay here stand up to microscopic inspection. Probably not. It’s S (‘End of talks’) positioned midway through PARLEY (the ‘talks’ again). Azed seemingly has no thyme for Rosemary.

22d Rich addition to cuisine? One’s restricted in this time of denial (6)
One (this time I rather than A) is restricted in ‘this’, ie the ‘Rich addition to cuisine’ or CREME (Chambers: cream, applied to various creamy substances), a word which inevitably calls to mind Miss Jean Brodie.

24d Cap I park jauntily? Could be a ——— RC restyled (as zucchetto?) (5)
For those who may not be entirely familiar with the composite anagram (Teacher: “Do you know long division?” Bart Simpson: “I know of it”), this type of clue is unusual in that the wordplay does not resolve into the solution, instead the solution must be included in the wordplay. It’s probably easiest to think of it like a mathematical equation where x and y are wordplay elements: in most clues ‘x + y = solution’, but in a composite anagram ‘x + solution = y’. 

An example of a non-&lit composite anagram would be “Nature’s thrilled RA with this air” (4).  The letters of RA plus the solution (‘this air’, ie TUNE) can be rearranged to form NATURE; paraphrasing the clue, it says “NATURE is an anagram of RA together with the solution, another word for which is air”. In a composite anagram &lit, the definition element is omitted – a classic example would be Colin Dexter’s “It’s this Littlewoods could make you” for WELL-TO-DO, where the letters of LITTLEWOODS have the potential to make you ITS WELL-TO-DO. In today’s clue, the letters of CAP I PARK when rearranged (‘jauntily’) could be a restyling of A KIPPA (replacing the blank) RC; without the bit in brackets it would be an example of a ‘comp anag &lit’ (the core of the definition being ‘Cap’), but Azed has seen fit to add ‘as zucchetto’, so the clue includes a definition and is simply a ‘comp anag’. For anyone wanting to better understand, or indeed to write, composite anagram clues, I would advise visiting the splendid archive of successful Azed competition clues to be found on the &Lit site and looking at some past prizewinners (composite anagrams will be clearly identified as such in the clue explanations).

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible , by email.

Azed 2,519 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3.5 / 10)

Some nice clues here, and the complete absence of ‘freebies’ (hiddens, initial letters of words in clue etc) served to make this a reasonably tricky puzzle. There is an issue with 29a (see below).

12a Part of buckle, e.g. Sam Browne’s end piece? (5)
“Browne’s end piece” is fine for E, but ‘e.g. Sam’ for CHAP only just passes the fairness test, not least because Sam could equally well be a chapess.

15a Vehicle on end of tail – waits may give you this (5)
The (rather inelegant, truth be told) phrasing of the clue makes it fairly obvious that the ‘waits’ are not those experienced in traffic jams; they are those folk who welcome in Christmas by having a good old alfresco sing-song, and would almost certainly give you a CAR (‘vehicle’) O (‘on’) L (‘end of tail’) or three.

16a What may be shown by fancier fa-la isn’t tremolo (8)
A well-disguised division between the definition and the wordplay, and an unusual anagram indicator. ‘Tremolo’ means ‘vibrating’ or ‘quavering’ in Italian, but I’m not sure that as an adjective it conveys that meaning in English – a ‘tremolo stop’ doesn’t itself quaver, rather it produces a quavering effect. But I’m nit-picking – we all understand what Azed wants us to do here.

17a What’s sacred to Hindus leaving its source in the Himalayas etc?(6)
Another minor quibble here: what’s sacred is R (River) GANGES, and I think you could argue that the ‘source’ of this which is leaving should be the R and not the first G.

23a Natural amphitheatres created by state of affairs, we hear (7)
I’m no fan of homophones, but Azed’s are invariably as sound as they come*. I like this one, the word which sounds like the solution being an abbreviation for ‘circumstances’. 

*I believe there is a clue in today’s Everyman “Reportedly scratched a Monet (6)”. If the setter really believes that Camille Monet pronounced her husband’s name as I would pronounce ‘clawed’, then I despair. I guess this reflects the idea that if someone from overseas has a name that is spelt the same as a familiar English name, then its correct pronunciation must be ‘the English way’.

26a Decorated with distinction that’s overdue when it’s about waste conveyor (8)
You may be starting to think that there’s scarcely a clue in this puzzle that I’m happy with! Here LATE (‘overdue’) contains (“when it’s about”) UREA (‘waste conveyor’), but urea is waste, not a waste conveyor – perhaps Azed was thinking of urine, which would better fit that description.

29a I look masculine in unit of light or dull brown (8)
There’s a real issue here. If you solved this one before 25d, then there’s every reason why you would have entered PHILAMOT, being (I LA M) in PHOT, rather than PHILOMOT (where ‘look’ is LO rather than LA). The wordplay can deliver either solution (a bit of a problem in itself), but the former is an accepted variant spelling of ‘filemot’ whilst the latter has not to the best of my knowledge been seen for three hundred years. Since the spelling PHILOMOT is attributed by Chambers to Joseph Addison, the only way to remove the ambiguity would have been to refer to him in the clue…or to re-write it.

6d It was a time of idleness, accepted behaviour with ten relaxing inside (7)
NORM (‘accepted behaviour’) has an anagram (‘relaxing’) of TEN inside, to produce a hyphenated solution that last appeared in AZ 2,458, where the clue was “Ten freely breaking rule in vacation formerly” – more succinct, but less satisfying in the way that it indicates the obsoleteness of the solution.

9d What makes the eccentric fret, artless? No crank, certainly (11)
A simple anagram (‘eccentric’) of FRET ARTLESS, but a lovely definition of the type which Azed is extremely adept at producing.

13d Mail carrier landed up for it in place (9)
LIT (‘landed’) reversed (‘up’) replaces (‘for’) IT in POSITION (‘place’).

18d Rag-and-bone man, last to get central position, plunging straight down (7)
STEPTOE (‘Rag-and-bone man’) with the last letter moved into the centre of the other six, producing a hyphenated solution. For the benefit of younger readers, the reference is to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son (1962-74) which featured rag-and-bone man Albert Steptoe and his son Harold. Fascinating factoid #1: Wilfrid Brambell (Albert) was only 13 years older than Harry H Corbett (Harold). Fascinating factoid #2: The ‘Son’ in the title is not Harold but Albert, and relates to the time when Albert and his mother operated the business.

27d In love, X scratched, mark in red (4)
Not the easiest clue to make sense of. The wordplay is SMITTEN (‘In love’) with TEN (‘X’) removed (‘scratched’).

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle, including clues not listed below.

Azed 2,518 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 10)

I struggled to make this one last beyond my second slice of Toastie and marmalade, Just the one ‘hidden’, but four other clues where the solution was obtained by selecting letters straight from the clue.  Perhaps a  little of the joie de vivre of last week’s puzzle was lacking from this one, but it still contained some entertaining clues.

9a Mop I’m handing over to seaman in state of dizziness (4)
The state of dizziness is a  SWIM, with I’M ‘handing over to’ (being replaced by) AB (‘seaman’, of the able sort). Incidentally, the term ‘able-bodied seaman’ seems to be a modern back-formation from the abbreviation AB, which was used in registers to clearly distinguish Able Seamen from their less accomplished (and less generously remunerated) brethren, the Ordinary Seamen, who were designated as OS.

14a This hemlock derivative encompasses end for Socrates – as icon perished?(5)
A composite anagram, where the letters of AS ICON when rearranged (‘perished’) can produce the solution plus S (the ‘end for Socrates’).

16a There’s a lot of blood attached to mafia family in this Chicago racket (7)
This US spelling of a word meaning din (‘Chicago racket’) is produced by attaching GOR(e) (‘a lot of blood’) to the end of CLAN (‘mafia family’). Chambers gives ‘Mafia’ a capital letter, but the OED doesn’t.

30a Love-making cut at start after bug returns? Not what you want in bed! (5)
One of those clues where a nice idea has proved tricky to realize. The ‘love-making cut at start’ for SEX without the S is fine, but MIC (shortened form of microphone) for ‘bug’ is a bit of a stretch. Worse still, ‘after bug returns’ might seem fine at first glance to mean ‘placed after MIC reversed’, but it doesn’t – ‘after’ with the present indicative introduces a subordinate clause relating to a sequence in time (‘Liverpool win after defender blunders’); for the wordplay to work, this element would need to be ‘after returning bug’.

3d Very young hawk, unconstrained, tail up (4)
EASY (‘unconstrained’) with the last letter (‘tail’) moved up a couple of places.

7d Secret crime society? One might deduce its members are up this (4)
This is a neat clue, the members of such a society very likely to be up TO NG (abbreviation for ‘no good’).

8d Husky in frost at head of sledge being unloaded? (6)
This parses as HOAR (‘frost’) above (‘at head of’) the first and last letters of ‘sledge’ (‘unloaded’, ie emptied out).

15d Not fully empowered, pub struggles, accordingly limiting that red wine (9)
The wording here has been twisted about in order to make the wordplay syntactically accurate, with the anagram of PUB (‘pub struggles’) having SO (‘accordingly’) containing it (‘limiting that, ‘that’ being the struggling pub), with TENT (‘red wine’) bringing up the rear.

22d Divine symbol of maleness, glam by implication (6)
‘Glam’ is implied by L IN GAM.

The girls who frequent picture-palaces
Are wary of psychoanalysis
Indeed, they’re annoyed
By the great Dr. Freud
And cling to their long-standing fallacies

23d New trap given room by motorists – it’s a dreadful pain (6)
Can the AA ‘giving room’ to an anagram of TRAP (‘new trap’) indicate containment? Probably not, in truth, but we all know what he means.

28d Part of crust rolled up as wrap (4)
I’m very surprised to find Azed giving no indication that this alternative spelling of ‘amice’ belongs firmly to the sixteenth century and has not been shared with any subsequent eras.