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 2,571 Plain

Difficulty rating: (1.5 / 5)

Another plain puzzle, which I thought was considerably easier than last week’s, albeit with a more generous helping of Scotticisms  than we have become accustomed to recently. There were a couple of tricky wordplays, but these were amply counterbalanced by the simple clues for the four ten-letter words around the perimeter.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clues 15a and 19d, specifically the definitions ‘They go up and down on catwalk’ and ‘We certainly won’t pull out’. Back in the day, clues which consisted solely of a cryptic definition were considered acceptable in barred puzzles, but by the early 1970s a subsidiary indication (‘wordplay’) had become a requirement. However, there is still a great deal of scope to use cryptic (or oblique, as I tend to call them) definitions in puzzles, and they can be particularly useful when indicating nouns which are difficult to define succinctly. Their use can make for very entertaining clues which provide a satisfying “D’oh” moment for the solver, but there are a couple of points to remember: firstly that although the oblique ‘definition’ will not be found in a dictionary it must offer a reasonable indication of the solution, and secondly that the  definition should combine smoothly with the wordplay – ideally the boundary between the two will also be disguised, although in the two clues here it isn’t. I can think of no better example for aspiring or improving setters than Richard Heald’s superlative clue for HACKETTE (AZ comp 2014), ‘Take the lead in Cinderella, playing girl who works in rags’, which ticks all the boxes quite beautifully.

11a Growing medium, not old, put out by inventor (4)
A six-letter word for an inventor (of words and phrases) has a two-letter word for ‘not’ – much used by barred puzzle setters but shown by Chambers as obsolete (‘old’) – removed (‘put out’).

14a Jock’s rolling wheelie, filled with energy (4)
See Drongo’s comment on this one below – the wordplay is straightforward, a three-letter word for a familiar site on British pavements commonly known as a ‘wheelie’ containing (‘filled with’) the usual single-letter abbreviation for energy, but there is a problem – that E could be placed in second or third place in the solution and in each instance would produce a valid spelling of a Scots word meaning ‘rich’ (ie “Jock’s rolling”). Those of us who applied the rule “I before E except after C” would have scooped the pool, but by luck rather than judgment. Anyone who entered the alternative version has my sympathy, particularly given that it is the ‘standard’ spelling.

16a Lock cleared of last fish (4)
The five-letter trademark for a type of high-security lock produced by a nineteenth century locksmith of the same name is missing its last letter (‘cleared of last’). Charles and Jeremiah Chubb started out as ironmongers in Portsmouth; in 1818 Jeremiah invented and patented the Detector, a near-impregnable lock. Any attempt to pick it resulted in the bolt being triggered in such a way that even the key would no longer open it, requiring the owner to release it with a ‘regulator’ key and then reset it with the standard key. The Detector became a byword for security, and was believed to be unpickable. Until, that is, an American locksmith, Arthur C Hobbs, turned up at the Great Exhibition of 1851 claiming that the Detector wasn’t half as secure as it was cracked up to be. In front of many witnesses, Hobbs picked the lock in 25 minutes; asked to do it again, he repeated the feat within 7 minutes, thus at a stroke destroying the absolute faith that the British public had placed in the Chubb lock. Hobbs subsequently (though with a great deal more effort) compromised a lock made by the other great English lock manufacturer, Bramah, thus opening up the British market to Hobbs’ employers, Day and Newell, and subsequently to a company that, trading on his overnight celebrity, he set up himself in the UK.

33a How-dye-do detected after school (7)
The usual three-letter abbreviation for ‘school’ is followed by the past active tense of a verb which can have a wide variety of meanings, ‘seize’ and ‘remove’ being two or the more obvious ones; the ‘detecting’ is in the sense of finding a fault or error in someone or something. Incidentally, I think an apostrophe is missing from the definition – it should be “How-d’ye-do”.

2d Sweet pastry, ornament in source of honey (7)
Azed doesn’t indicate that the (rather unlikely-looking) four-letter word for an ornament which is to be placed inside a three-letter ‘source of honey’ is archaic, but it is; a more familiar word with the same spelling is an interjection expressing pain.

4d Lead everybody after mounting skill in old game (8)
The chemical symbol for lead and a three-letter word for ‘everybody’ when placed after a reversal (‘mounting’) of a three-letter word for ‘skill’ produce the name of an old game in which the batsman has to strike a device which releases a ball into the air, whereupon the batsman must give the ball itself a whack.

5d Claw, not one found in part of French seaside town (8)
A five-letter word for the claw of an arthropod has a one-letter word for ‘one’ removed (‘not one’) before being put inside a four-letter word for a part in a theatrical sense. This clue is a good example of how the definition of a tricky proper adjective can be seamlessly integrated into a clue.

7d Sir H. Lauder’s turn? Not what he’s do round Scots city (4)
For the purposes of the definition, Sir Harry Lauder is there to indicate that the word is Scottish; in the wordplay, you need to remove (‘not’) a four-letter word for what Harry Lauder would do when on stage from the outside (’round’) of the name of a city ‘north of the border’. I don’t know why Azed has used ‘Scots’ here – in this situation ‘Scottish’ is surely correct, a view supported by Chambers. Younger readers may not know too much about Harry Lauder: born in Edinburgh in 1870, he spent ten years working in the mines but was already singing to entertain his fellow miners and performing in local music halls. He turned professional around 1894 and joined a touring concert party, but his journey to worldwide fame really started in 1900, when he appeared in London with an act which he had made comprehensible to a non-Scottish audience. His songs such as Roamin’ in the Gloamin and I Love a Lassie combined with his flair for comedy and his trademark Scottish costume – complete with twisty walking stick (cromack) – turned him into a huge worldwide star. Following a successful tour of the US in 1907, he returned the next year with a 15-piece orchestra, pipers etc who were taken around the country aboard a three-coach train, the “Harry Lauder Special”. He raised considerable sums for the war effort and set up a charity to support injured Scottish soldiers and sailors; he was knighted in 1919 for service to the Empire. It’s said that during the worst times in World War 2 Winston Churchill would repeatedly listen to Lauder’s recording of his song (Keep Right on to) The End of the Road in order to keep his spirits up. Lauder himself once said “I’m tellin’ ye, happiness is one of the few things in this world that doubles every time you share it with someone else.”

9d King with state requiring relief mostly? It’s given as solemn token (4)
A one-letter abbreviation of ‘king’ (in the chess sense) followed by a four-letter term for ‘[a] state requiring relief’ missing its last letter (‘mostly’).

19d Sprinter poorly dressed? We certainly won’t pull out (8)
The ‘poorly dressed’ requires a degree of pre-processing, just as ‘having retired’ in a clue might need to be translated into ‘in BED’; the sprinter is the four-letter surname of probably the only twenty-first century sprinter that most people could name.

23d Fate? One’s limited in preference when there’s no ice (6)
You might wonder whether this is some sort of &lit, but it is a conventional definition/wordplay clue where the wordplay references the definition – a three-letter word for ‘fate’ (‘one’) is contained by (‘limited in’) a six-letter word for ‘preference’ from which the letters ICE have been removed (“when there’s no ice”).

30d A wee bittie Scotch cheers – something with gin too (4)
Another Scots word, this one formed by putting a two-letter word meaning ‘cheers’ next to a two-letter informal term for a type of vermouth which is (or at least was at one time) often added to gin.

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,570 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3.5 / 5)

Quite a tricky puzzle, I thought, with not too many ‘gimmes’ and a solution across the top that took a bit of teasing out. I felt that Azed enjoyed setting this one, and there were some nice clues, although there were also a few where the surface reading didn’t quite convince.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clue 25d, “Military supremo at head of troops, rarely surrounded (5)”. The wordplay is straightforward, C-IN-C (Commander-in-Chief) being followed by T (‘head of troops’), and the solution is a word meaning ‘surrounded’ which is given by Chambers as ‘rare’ (hence the ‘rarely’). But there is another word in the clue, that ‘at’ between the two elements of the wordplay. We often see juxtaposition indicators in puzzles; on occasion they play a role in the cryptic reading, reversing the natural order of the elements in a charade (eg ‘is behind time’ to indicate TIS), but frequently they are there purely for the benefit of the surface reading and perform no cryptic role (eg ‘is on time’ to indicate IST). I don’t believe that there is any consensus on what juxtaposition indicators are acceptable – Chambers gives a meaning for many prepositions (eg ‘to’ = ‘beside’) that could be used to justify their use between wordplay elements X and Y to indicate either XY or YX. There are many such indicators that I am happy to employ, and a number of them are listed in the Clinical Data section of this site; there are others which I don’t like, in particular X ‘has’ (or X’s) Y to mean XY. The use of ‘at’ doesn’t appeal to me either – I suppose one could argue that the Chambers definition is so broad that it supports the usage, and someone who is “at the door” is in front of it – or are they behind it? – but you won’t be seeing it in a puzzle of mine.

1a Open fabric marker kept in series for amateur handicraft (12)
A five-letter open fabric is followed by a four-letter word for a marker (in the sense of a pointer) inside (‘kept in’) the usual three-letter abbreviation for ‘series’; having watched the Antiques Roadshow on many occasions I was familiar with a more common form of the solution, but can’t remember coming across this variant before.

10a Trouble getting in fish for tourist hotel (7)
My first experience of crosswords containing obscure words was gained by solving the Autolycus puzzle in the Birmingham Post each Saturday – I don’t know if the setter was a fisherman, but the various stages in the lifecycle of a salmon were very much front and centre. Here we have a three-letter word for ‘trouble’ contained by (‘getting in’) the term for a ‘young salmon up to two years of age, before it becomes a smolt’. I wonder whether the other salmon hold a party to celebrate the onset of smoltship? With cake…fishcake, of course.

14a Hawking may produce this subject in result (6)
A cryptic definition intended to misdirect the solver towards a famous physicist and cosmologist, and a wordplay that involves a three-letter word for ‘[to] subject’ (as you might subject someone to a test or a sword) inside a three-letter word for ‘[a] result’.

15a Spot roughly treated mostly round front of chin (6)
A six-letter word meaning ‘treated roughly’ without its last letter (‘mostly’) containing (’round’) the first letter (‘front’) of ‘chin’.

16a Wild buffalo? I appreciate that wafted aroma (7)
Here a two-letter informal interjection meaning ‘I appreciate that’ is followed by an anagram (‘wafted’) of AROMA.

23a Stomachs financial undoing, one involving millions (6)
A four-letter word for ‘financial undoing’ and a one-letter word meaning ‘one’ containing (‘involving’) the usual abbreviation for ‘millions’.

29a Old bird, one hiding its head, but not that one! (6)
The sort of bird which legend suggests might hide its head in the sand (which is not the bird that forms the answer to the clue – hence the ‘but not that one!’) does indeed ‘hide its head’ by having its first letter removed from sight.

3d Occasion, we hear, for a poet’s tears (5)
Azed thankfully uses homophones sparingly, and unless you are Inspector Clouseau you are going to be happy with this one, where the solution sounds like a word for ‘occasion’ (or ‘scope’, as in ‘there is scope for improvement’).

4d Mark, one seen on note becoming due (8)
This one may puzzle solvers outside the UK; the new £50 note issued by the Bank of England in June this year features a portrait of mathematician and WW2 codebreaker Alan Turing.

9d Light rain effective action cleared from street (4)
Here the usual abbreviation for ‘street’ is to be removed from a six-letter word meaning an ‘effective action, feat, achievement’ to produce a dialectal word for ‘light rain’. I remain unconvinced that ‘X cleared from Y’ can mean X with Y removed; ‘free from’ would I think be understood, or ‘cleared of’, but ‘cleared from Y’ means that something has been removed from Y, not the other way round.

11d Upright, active, this lot work making a point (11, 3 words)
A charade of a five-letter term for ‘upright’ (in the sense of a typeface), the usual abbreviation for ‘active’, and a five-letter word that could mean ‘this lot’, producing a (5,1,5) solution that includes a couple of accented vowels.

18d Old pavilions? Matches will include one (8)
Azed is not by any means averse to using a qualifier such as ‘old’ in a definition to indicate not that the solution is archaic or obsolete but that the particular meaning of the word qualified is itself antediluvian, so here the the solver should be looking at the entry for ‘pavilion’ in Chambers. The wordplay involves a six-letter word for ‘matches’ (in the sense of ‘reproduces’) containing a two-letter word for ‘one’.

21d Top lady exchanges lid for one to have a favourable effect (7)
A seven-letter ‘top lady’ (Queen Victoria, perhaps, but not the present Queen) has her first letter (‘lid’) exchanged for the Roman numeral representing ‘one’.

27d Salt cellar initially passed for junior cleric at bishop’s tea party (5)
The wordplay here is clear, the first letter of ‘cellar’ (‘cellar initially’) being removed from a six-letter term for a junior cleric, but what is Azed on about in the surface reading? Is he thinking of the cartoon published in Judy in 1895 featuring a bishop and curate at the breakfast table, or a remarkably similar one which appeared in Punch the following year? I can see that the salt would have been passed to the curate for him to apply to his egg (‘some parts of it are very good’), but where does the tea party come from? Please don’t say Boston.

28d Commotion with withdrawal of US has me mostly gripped in worries (5)
A four-letter word for a commotion has the letters US removed (‘with withdrawal of US’) and our setter’s name all but the last letter (‘me mostly’) put inside (‘gripped’). Seems topical, but it’s likely that the clue was written months ago unless Azed has had reason to rewrite it at the eleventh hour. I would have to say that the surface reading is pretty weak – have you ever heard anyone say that they were ‘mostly gripped in worries’? No, I didn’t think so.

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,569 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3.5 / 5)

A bit of a mixture – some straightforward anagrams and three hiddens, offset by some tricky wordplays and twelve entries with unchecked first letters. Overall I thought the difficulty was above average. As I solve a puzzle I mark the clues that I think worthy of comment; when I came to put the marked clues into the template for these notes I found that they exactly filled the available slots – I usually have three or four slots unused when the puzzle is of average difficulty or below, hence the relatively high rating.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clue 6d, “Bully waste, light brown at the edges” (7). The wordplay involves UREA (‘waste’) having TAN (‘light brown’) put around it (‘at the edges’), but the element of interest is the definition, ‘Bully’. TAUREAN means ‘of or relating to a bull’, but there is no entry in Chambers for ‘bully’ under the headword ‘bull’ (in the bovine sense). The definition is what I usually term ‘fanciful’, and relies on the solver understanding what the word would mean if it did exist. The rather overused ‘flower’ to indicate a river falls into the same category. Strictly speaking, all clues that rely on these ‘made up’ words are unsound, but they add a bit of variety and fun to puzzles and I enjoy coming across them from time to time. There is, of course, a risk that the idea can be taken too far – ‘detailed’ indicating the removal of the last letter of a word strikes me as borderline, and the use, say, of ‘ingest’ to indicate containment in DEED strikes me as something that has no place outside, perhaps, The Guardian.

10a Publish a prince penning chapter all about sanctuaries (8)
A three-letter word for ‘publish’ (or ‘broadcast’) plus A (from the clue) and a three-letter crossword staple for ‘prince’ containing (‘penning’) the usual single-letter abbreviation for chapter, the whole lot being reversed (‘all about’).

13a Knight formally clad? Something in wool (5)
The single-letter abbreviation for ‘knight’ used by chess players is placed inside a four-letter word for a piece of formal attire (‘formally clad?’); when you read the Chambers entry for the solution you can understand Azed’s choice of definition!

14a ‘Would-be literary so-so’? Oscar’s chum stuck with that (7)
The nickname given to Lord Alfred Douglas (“Oscar’s chum”) by his mother is transfixed by (‘stuck with’) a two-letter informal term meaning ‘so-so’.

15a Aristophanes? Poet’s played about with his Frogs like these (4)
A composite anagram, where the word ARISTOPHANES can be formed from a rearrangement (‘played about’) of POET’S, HIS and the solution (‘Frogs like these’). Note that here the words ‘like these’ are necessary; without them there would be no valid definition as ‘Frogs’ is required as part of the wordplay. I can expand on this point if required.

22a Old reptile, all but calamitous when held back in Alabama (8)
A word meaning ‘calamitous’ missing its last letter (‘all but’) is reversed (‘held back’) inside the three-letter abbreviation for ‘Alabama’.

24a Ball not quite hitting target? End almost cut off, willingly (6, 2 words)
This one seems very tortuous. The word BALL (‘from the clue’) has a three-letter word for ‘quite’ removed from it (leaving just a single letter), then a two-word phrase (2,5) meaning ‘hitting [the] target’ in a golfing context has most of the word END (‘end almost’) removed (‘cut off’) in order to produce a (3,3) French expression. Incroyable!

25a Like some Chinese art, has been put up back to front (5)
Here a word meaning ‘has been put up’ (in the sense, say, of a picture in a gallery) has its last letter moved to the start (‘back to front’).

33a Be active on globe with backing guitar (5)
A two-letter word meaning ‘be active’ (a definition given by Chambers) is followed by a three-letter word for ‘globe’ which has been reversed (‘with backing’). The solution is the name of a resonator guitar manufacturer which, Hoover-like, has become a generic term for a wood-bodied single-cone resonator guitar (thanks, Wikipedia).

3d Uncertain weather? Something for the head mostly packed (5)
A three-letter word for the weather (or where it comes from) has a three-letter word for ‘something for the head’ without its last letter (‘mostly’) inside (‘packed’).

7d Permit’s required to catch local birds (7)
I find that crossword editors these days aren’t too keen on clues like this – it reads well, but the word ‘required’ is de trop; ‘Permits to catch local birds’ would be preferred. Anyway, the birds appear when a four-letter representation of “permit’s” ‘catches’ a three-letter word for [a] local.

8d Regional Spanish clubs superior to Italian one? No thanks (7)
Azed shows a previously-unsuspected knowledge of footy. The usual abbreviation for ‘clubs’ is followed by the eight-letter name of a Serie A club (‘Italian one”, ie Italian club) from which the letters TA have been removed (‘No thanks).

20d Like Hooray Henry’s girl, certainly uppish, pocketing debt (7)
A three-letter interjection meaning ‘certainly’ is reversed (‘uppish’) around (‘pocketing’) a word for ‘debt’. Well, I don’t really think it is a word for debt – ‘advance’ would be nearer the mark.

21d Sugar-making refuse such as is dumped in endless heaps (7)
A two-letter abbreviation meaning ‘such as’ is contained by (‘dumped in’) a six-letter word for ‘heaps’ (as in ‘lots and lots’) from which (something of a repeating theme in this puzzle) the last letter has been removed (‘endless’).

26d Ritual drink: state portions to be exchanged (5)
The name of a city in Nebraska (which was also the codename of a Normandy beach, but is not – as Davey points out below – a state) is divided into two portions, of three and two letters respectively, and the parts are swapped over (‘exchanged’).

28d Tickle? One doing this will get fish (5)
I really don’t think this word means ‘tickle’, and neither does Chambers – ‘fondle’ would be ok (although of course the clue would then only make sense to Troy McClure fans). Whatever, its related agent noun (ie someone who does the tickling/fondling) is also the name of a fish.

30d Logician finding link in even numbers (or consecutive odd ones?) (4)
Two wordplays, the first a simple hidden and the second also a hidden but in a pair of words which are suggested rather than being given in the clue.

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,568 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2 / 5)

Perhaps a smidgeon easier than last week’s puzzle, but still I felt very close to the middle of the difficulty spectrum. Although 13×11 grid are certainly not the norm for barred crosswords, Azed uses them every few weeks in place of his ‘standard’ 12×12 size to give a bit of variety.

Hearty congrats are due to Richard Heald on retaining his title as the top Azed competitor – I make that the eighth time that he has been at the summit, either singly or jointly, in the past fourteen seasons. He consistently writes imaginative, entertaining and beautifully-constructed clues, and his success is well deserved.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clue 18a, “Pet having a suitable doctor brought in clipped as a proviso (6)”. Nothing too complex here: CAT (‘Pet’) has A VE(t) inserted (‘suitable doctor brought in clipped’) to produce CAVEAT. Slightly unusually, the insertion and last letter deletion indicators are effectively combined (‘brought in clipped’), but it was the ‘suitable doctor’, referencing the pet/cat, which got me thinking. This clue is fine, a vet is a suitable doctor for a cat, but what if the ‘pet’ had turned out, say, to be not ‘cat’ but ‘pamper’; a vet would be no more ‘suitable for a pamper’ than any other doctor (and possibly less so, depending on what their most recent work had involved, I’ve seen All Creatures Great and Small). If we evaluate the hypothetical clue serially, then ‘pet’ has already turned into PAMPER before we get to the ‘suitable’, so could the solver still be expected to associate the ‘suitable doctor’ with ‘pet’ in that situation? Think carefully, because if the answer isn’t ‘yes’ then there is a problem with 19d, as the ‘holy scriptures’ in the definition aren’t the same ones that are referenced in the wordplay. Poisonally (as Catarella would say in Stephen Sartarelli’s translations of Andrea Camilleri’s brilliant Montalbano novels) I think they could.

12a Gill spreading wings, with full range to pick from (8, 3 words)
It is only when you get to gill⁵ in Chambers that you find the “two- or four-wheeled cart for carrying timber”, which is ‘spreading’ (inserted into) a four-letter word (taken straight from the Latin) for ‘wings’.

21a Acute anaemia, not universal in expressionist style (6)
The seven-letter word for the ‘Wild Beast’ style of expressionist painting of which Matisse was an exponent has the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘universal’ removed (‘not universal’) to produce the solution.

26a Simon’s chance encounter I’ll abandon for possible primate once (6)
What Simple Simon met when on the way to the fair without the I (“I’ll abandon”) provides the missing link. I’m not sure that ‘encounter’ can represent the person or thing encountered rather than the event, but I can’t think of word which does!

28a Shelter after rain’s beginning, not the first for mowers (4)
The first letter of ‘rain’ (“rain’s beginning”) is followed by a word meaning ‘[to] shelter’, more commonly seen suffixed by ‘-ing’ and describing the thing that does the covering or sheltering; the solution is ‘a second mowing of grass in the same season’ and is an alternative spelling of a five-letter word.

31a Churchman abandoning work, a mistake (4)
Here a six-letter churchman ‘abandons’ the usual two-letter abbreviation for ‘work’. Quite a lot of repetition in this puzzle, ‘abandon’ also appearing in 26, ‘colt’ in 15 and 29, and ‘old’ in 23 and 25.

3d Without extremes of cunning, such a situation is hopeless (5)
A seven-letter adjective meaning ‘cunning’ has its first and last letters removed (‘Without extremes’) to produce the hyphenated (2-3) solution.

4d Expert airman rising in foremost position, showing what’s distinctive on wing tip (6)
The wordplay here is straightforward, a three-letter word for an ‘Expert airman’ being reversed (‘rising’) inside (‘in’) a three-letter word for ‘foremost position’, but understanding the definition requires the knowledge that a wing tip is ‘a brogue shoe in which the toecap extends backwards and to the sides, suggesting the shape of a bird with outstretched wings.’ Prior to today, I did not possess that knowledge, and it is likely that within the week it will have left me again.

5d Religious schools (hard to find!) were on edge? (7)
They are indeed hard to find in the printed editions of Chambers, because they are listed under the ‘cheder’, the singular form of a variant spelling. Users of electronic versions of Chambers should have no such problems. The wordplay is a three word phrase (3,1,3) loosely equating to ‘were on edge’.

7d Pair of stipules wild sorrel has on inside (5)
Solving this clue without checkers would mean being familiar with either the solution or OCA, a South American wood sorrel, which has a two-letter preposition meaning ‘on’ inside.

19d Holy scriptures: version thereof is Roman one (6)
The ‘thereof’ refers back to the ‘Holy scriptures’ which forms the definition, and the wordplay is thus a charade of a two-letter abbreviation for a version of the Scriptures (but not the ones which form the solution), a three-letter Latin word meaning ‘is’ (‘is Roman’) and a single-letter word meaning ‘one’.

20d Napkins to twist up (6)
The letters TO (from the clue) are followed by a verb meaning ‘twist’ or ‘swing round unexpectedly’ which is reversed (‘up’).

22d Paddy, soaked. succeeded coming first (5)
A five-letter word meaning ‘soaked’ has the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘succeeded’ moved into the leading position (‘coming first’). The surface reading doesn’t work properly – it needs ‘in’ or a comma following ‘succeeded’, but either would render the wordplay unsound.

23d Old snake may be in this cage (5)
The letters IN when followed by the solution (‘this cage’) produce an archaic (hence the ‘old’) word for an ungrateful person, ie a ‘snake’.

25d Alms required endlessly – see the old assemble (5)
A six-letter word for ‘alms’ with its last letter missing (‘endlessly’) makes an obsolete verb meaning ‘assemble’.

27d Farmstead flourished – as fed with this salt beef? (4)
A composite anagram to finish off with, where the letters of FARMSTEAD when rearranged (‘flourished’) can produce AS FED plus the solution (‘this salt beef’).

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,567 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 5)

An entertaining puzzle which seemed pretty close to the middle of the difficulty spectrum, generous helpings of disguise and misdirection (together with more than a touch of mischievousness) being offset by ten anagrams and a trio of hiddens. Some nice clues in there, including a couple of &lits.

Setters’ Corner:

Occasionally I have a look at the fifteensquared Azed blog, which I’m pleased to say regularly receives more comments now than it did four or five years ago. I noticed that the blog for AZ 2,564 had accumulated a generous helping of comments, which prompted me to take a squiz. I was gratified to see that many of the remarks related to a new solver joining the Azed ranks, but my eye was taken by a criticism of certain clues, in particular of 7d, “Junkie, how one might describe Cressida?”, the solution to which is ACID-HEAD.

The objections were that (i) an acid-head is not a ‘junkie’, and (ii) that Dame Cressida Dick is the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, and therefore not ‘A CID head’. Now, as regular readers will know, I’m not averse to a bit of nit-picking, in particular where I believe the wording of a clue is questionable; but points of grammatical accuracy and shades of definition are horses of rather different colours.

Errors do occur, of course – a recent Mephisto used ‘cashier’ to define ‘demote’, which is hard to defend – but in general setters have to be given a bit of latitude. Most &lit clues would fail if their definitions were examined closely, and sometimes a solver with expertise in a particular area will attach a meaning to a word with a precision beyond the scope of the setter’s knowledge or of dictionaries such as Chambers.

Going back to the Azed clue, the OED ‘s definition of a junkie is ‘a drug-addict’ and of an acid head as ‘someone who habitually takes the drug LSD’ which seems plenty close enough for a layman, while Cressida Dick not only has responsibility for the Metropolitan Police’s Criminal Investigation Department but was at one time head of the Specialist Crime Directorate. Of course the view of what’s fair in a crossword and what’s not will always be subjective, but I don’t see a problem here.

1a A hot slice of tart epicure cooked to feed healthily (12)
An anagram (‘cooked’) of A HOT T(art) EPICURE. There are those who would say that ‘slice’ is no more appropriate to indicate the first letter of a word than any single letter or group of consecutive letters from it. I would probably count myself amongst them.

13a Urgent – plump in the middle? See lens measurement (7)
A four-letter word for ‘Urgent’ (a meaning given by Chambers but not the OED, which restricts itself to the more familiar ‘dreadful’) in the middle of a three-letter word for ‘plump’ in the sense which I will forever associate with Arthur Marshall and Frank Muir making their selections from the three explanations of obscure words given on Call My Bluff (this will be lost on anyone who hasn’t seen the programme, and probably on many who have!).

16a Party provided warmth about start of evening (6)
Here we have a two-letter word meaning (inter alia) ‘provided’ followed by a three-letter word for ‘warmth’ (in the sense of anger) containing the first letter of ‘evening’. I don’t in truth think that ‘warmth’ is quite the same as anger- the OED goes no further than ‘a heated state of the temper approaching anger’ – but in view of my comments in the Setter’s Notes above I think I ought to let it pass… 😉

17a Colts accepting start of training? (6)
A nice little &lit, with a five-letter word for colts (or lambs) left by their mother(s) and brought up by hand containing (‘accepting’) the first letter of ‘training’.  The use of the same letter selection indicator in two clues in the same puzzle would normally be considered unacceptable by editors; here the same indicator (‘start’) appears in two consecutive clues, although one instance could readily have been replaced by ‘beginning’, say.

18a Heat meat for cottage pie, setting aside first three quarters (7)
A five-letter word for the meat that would go into a cottage pie has its first letter removed (‘setting aside first’) and is followed by the abbreviations for three cardinal points (‘three quarters’). Sneaky.

23a Experience taking in flash? One has no shorts! (7)
I worked out the solution from part of the wordplay and the definition, not knowing that the ‘flash’ that is contained by a three-letter word for ‘[to] experience’ is a pool or marshy place; the solution is a foot (of the prosodic variety) which contains just two long syllables – and therefore no shorts.

33a Vacated theatre and left only half set (4)
The first and last letters of ‘theatre’ (‘Vacated theatre’) and half of the word ‘left’ (‘left only half’) combine to produce the sort of set that might be seen in the corner of a room or, perhaps more likely these days, on the wall.

34a Mitre might be this indication of grade (12, 2 words)
The (5,2,5) solution when preceded by something like ‘one possible’ could indicate the letter sequence MITRE.

5d Old bungs foiled user opening special up (6)
An anagram (‘foiled’, ie baffled) of USER inserted into (‘opening’) a reversal (‘up’) of a two-letter abbreviation for ‘special’. The solution itself is not obsolete, but bung⁵, a bit of criminal slang from the 16^th/17^th centuries, certainly is – hence the qualification ‘Old’.

6d To recap, with it Roman somehow encapsulated….his admired philosopher (12, 2 words)
A two-word (2,3) phrase meaning ‘To recap’ has an anagram (‘somehow’) of IT ROMAN contained within it (‘encapsulated’), producing the (6,6) description applied by Cicero to Plato.

11d Chilled Scotch in Jock’s bar (5)
A double Scotch, as it were – the meaning of ‘a dam in a stream’ (‘bar’) is unlikely to spring to the minds of those south of the border (and perhaps even of some to the north of it), but the ‘chilled’ (or ‘chilly’) sense will be familiar to both Scot and non-Scot alike.

14d E.g. Christian doctor, just as timely (9)
A two-letter abbreviation for a particular type of doctor is followed by a two-word (2,5) phrase meaning ‘just as timely’; the ‘E.g’ is needed because this is a definition by example, there being many non-Christians who would associate themselves with the solution.

20d Lay about wandering male, minor luminary? (7)
A luminary is a source of light, so a minor luminary is a source of a small amount of light, yes? A three-letter verb meaning ‘lay’ contains an anagram (‘wandering’) of MALE.

22d Rolled up coat following guide (6)
This one puzzled me briefly, until I realized that the charade was made up of a three-letter word for ‘coat’ and a three-letter word meaning ‘following [a] guide’, a verb in participle form.

25d Banter (one might suppose) I introduced to restrain (6)
The wordplay involves the letter I being put inside (‘introduced to’) a five-letter word meaning ‘to restrain’ (or put off). The definition is fanciful (hence the ‘one might suppose’), based on the verb ‘bant’, itself a back-formation from Banting – not a participle but the name of a 19th century Londoner who wrote of his success with a dietary system devised by an ear surgeon.

William Banting was a five-foot-five undertaker and coffin maker who weighed over 200 pounds. By all accounts a good-humoured man, he said of his considerable consumption of sweets and fatty foods that “a big ship is not built with scanty materials”. A member of the family whose business handled the funeral of anyone who was anyone (including Prince Albert), he became less chirpy in retirement, suffering from a number of ailments apparently linked to obesity, and complaining “If fat is not an insidious enemy I do not know what is.” He tried many remedies for his condition (including at least 90 Turkish baths), but in the absence of a Victorian Jamie Oliver he was at the end of his tether when he was further afflicted with hearing loss; he consulted William Harvey, a well-known ear surgeon and a friend of Charles Dickens, who told Banting that his hearing issue was a result of excess fat blocking an auditory canal. He prescribed a diet low in sugar and starch, excluding such things as potatoes, bread, butter and beer. The regimen was a huge success – Banting lost 46lb in a year and his health (including his hearing) improved enormously. Wanting to share the secrets of his weight loss, Banting wrote a pamphlet which he entitled A Letter on Corpulence. It was a huge success, to the extent that within just a few years ‘to bant’ had become synonymous with ‘to diet’.

27d Old soldier, last promoted to lead 20’s a slight one? (5)
The soldier dates back to Roman days, being the Latin word for same, and his last letter is moved to the start (‘last promoted to lead’). Probably only Azed could get away with indicating that a slight instance of the solution could be described by the answer to 20d.

30d Heading heavenward, maid leaves glittering stake (4)
A neat clue, with a reversal (‘Heading heavenward’) of MAID leaving an eight-letter word meaning ‘glittering’ to produce the solution. I did wonder whether Azed could have used an alternative term for glittering in order to make the surface reading even better, perhaps ‘flaring’, but on refection I think that ‘glittering’ is itself something of a stretch for an adjective which means ‘covered in glittery things’ rather than ‘glittering’.

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,566 ‘Playfair’

Difficulty rating: (5 / 10)

Don’t be put off attempting this puzzle by the Playfair aspect – it’s perfectly possible to do what I did, solving the four clues without definitions, identifying the link between them, working out the code phrase, and simply encoding the thematic entries into the grid.

I’m not a fan of Playfair puzzles, which I don’t see as a good way of attracting solvers into the world of the barred puzzle. I think it is suited only to puzzles which might be described by aficionados as ‘erudite’ and by less enthusiastic solvers as ‘recondite’. Decoding the cipher has always struck me as tedious, and therefore I am pleased that in recent Playfair puzzles Azed has offered an alternative route by providing clues to the code phrase itself. At the end of these notes I have added a description of how I set about finding the code phrase from the clues, thus avoiding the the decoding process, including parsing for the four clues lacking definitions. After that, I have included the hints that I have given in the past for Playfair decoding where no alternative route to the code phrase is available; this can be ignored by anyone who goes down the ‘guess the code phrase’ route.

I felt that while there were a few simple clues in this puzzle, many made no concession to the extra difficulty associated with the  Playfair aspect, which made cracking the code by establishing the correspondence between clear and encoded forms even less appealing. Anyone who solved it without assistance did very well; if they did it by working back from the encoded entries to discover the code phrase, then they did even better – though I wonder why they bothered, since in order to crack the code they must have solved enough of the asterisked solutions to enable them to establish the code phrase with sufficient certainty to at least try encoding a couple of the thematic solutions.

8a Bishop in usually striped cloth? Not necessarily (4)
A low-tariff &lit, involving a single-letter abbreviation of ‘bishop’ inside a three-letter word for a Syrian cloth of goat or camel hair, usually striped. The ‘not necessarily’ is there to indicate that the bishop in the definition, who may be Syriac or Coptic, is no more likely to be seen about town wearing striped cloth than any other type of fabric.

11a Piano’s left out of tune, though not old, relating to a chord? (6)
An anagram (‘out of tune’) of PIANOS L (‘left’) without O (‘though not old’); the definition takes advantage of ‘chord’ being an old spelling of ‘cord’.

14a What implies Benin is swell (5)
The IVR code for Benin (formerly Dahomey) is DY, and the solution suggests this pair of letters.

17a Oil extraction centre, where you find youngsters, dropping out, in old breeches (8, 2 words)
YOUTH (‘youngsters’) without OUT (‘dropping out’) are found within an archaic Irish word for close-fitting breeches, producing a (3,5) solution.

18a Mark reef at sea: there’s bony fish (4)
A triple definition clue, the first (verb or noun) being the one of the three that is most commonly used by landlubbers.

21a Poet’s bar, supplying special, was out mostly (6)
A two-letter abbreviation for ‘special’ is followed by a five-letter word for ‘was inaccurate’ (‘was out’) without its last letter (‘mostly’). The solution is a Shakespearean word, hence the qualification “Poet’s”.

33a Plastic resin: it was liquid (5)
A two-letter abbreviation for ‘sex appeal’ (‘it’) plus a three-letter word meaning ‘was liquid’ (or at least ‘behaved like a liquid’). ‘It’ is that indefinable quality ascribed to certain female film stars, most famously Clara Bow. She starred in the 1927 film “It”, about which Variety said “You can’t get away from this Clara Bow girl. She certainly has that certain ‘It’…and she just runs away with the film.” Consequently she became known as ‘The It Girl’. Sadly it was not Clara but a character in Elinor Glyn’s novel ‘It’ that Dorothy Parker was referring to when she wrote in a review “And she had It. It, hell; she had Those”.

35a Wild gale or rain? Have this brolly fabric near (6)
A nice composite anagram, where a rearrangement (‘Wild’) of GALE OR RAIN can produce the solution (‘this brolly fabric’) plus NEAR. The material in question, also called zanella cloth, is a mixture of silk and wool or cotton in a close diagonal twill weave (so I understand). The material of choice for lightweight umbrellas in the nineteenth century, it also found favour as a dress material, and makes an appearance as such in Anne of Green Gables: “Oh, how pretty it was—a lovely soft brown gloria with all the gloss of silk; a skirt with dainty frills and shirrings; a waist elaborately pintucked in the most fashionable way, with a little ruffle of filmy lace at the neck. But the sleeves—they were the crowning glory! Long elbow cuffs, and above them two beautiful puffs divided by rows of shirring and bows of brown-silk ribbon.”

2d Old manor: worried when it’s not included in deed (4)
The idea here is that when this four-letter historical word for a manor is put inside DE….ED it produces an eight-letter word meaning ‘worried’ (in  the US, or ‘seasoned highly and broiled’ in the UK), although you have to read the wordplay in the right way.

5d Treat youngsters cruelly, Squeers-style – protective garb needed (7)
Wackford Squeers ensured that both he and Dotheboys Hall lived up to their names, with his predilection towards beatings regularly leading him to ??? ????.

7d Shuffle letter sequence around (not hard?) (5)
Kudos to anyone who solved this without the help of crossing letters. The letter sequence which must be moved around is DEFGHI, but without the H (‘not hard’). I beg to disagree.

9d House denied love latterly, a heap of waste (4)
The sort of house that involves little ducks and obese ladies loses its closing O (‘denied love latterly’) to produce a dialect word for a pile of rubbish that shares its name, and some might say its qualities, with a search engine

10d After battle of the sexes perhaps following shrink? (7)
Not one of Azed’s finest – the battle of the sexes is a BED WAR, and it precedes the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘following’.

11d What might describe mineral fragments? Well, not these (8)
But this is better. A three-letter word for [a] well is followed by a five-letter word for the people or things that aren’t these (‘not these’).

16d Tennents? This aye disposes of watery beers (8)
Tennents produce Scotland’s best-selling lager, and they (or certain key individuals on their payroll, anyway) could be described by this ‘now mainly Scottish’ word. The wordplay involves a composite anagram, where the solution (‘this’) and AYE can be rearranged (‘disposes of’) WATERY BEERS.

21d Traipse south over clay, losing energy (4)
Solving this clue requires two pieces of knowledge – firstly that the clay which must have its E removed (‘losing energy’) is LUTE, and secondly that a traipse is a slattern.

22d Rarely grasp what was written about soil’s efflorescence (7)
Here we have an old four-letter spelling of a word for ‘written’ invariably seen today with six letters  containing (‘about’) REH, apparently ‘an efflorescence of sodium salts on the soil in India, etc.’ No, me neither.

29d Group of seven? Faces losing six (5)
A seven-letter word for ‘faces’ loses the Roman numerals representing six to produce the members of a group that appeared in the puzzle a few week ago, comprising seven philosophers, statesmen and law-givers of sixth-century Greece.

(definitions are underlined)

How I set about this puzzle

Completing a Playfair puzzle essentially depends on blind-solving the entries which are encoded in the grid, so that is usually the best place to start. Here it seemed the only sensible place to start, since Azed had told us that the solutions to the asterisked clues were linked, being described (collectively, it seemed reasonable to assume) by the code phrase. The most promising clue looked like 25, ‘Cask soak knocked back (6)’; surely this would involve a three-letter word for a cask and a three-letter word for ‘soak’, with either the whole lot or the second word alone reversed (‘knocked back’). I could only think of two three-letter words for ‘soak’ – one being SOT and the other that setters’ favourite RET. Since Azed used ‘soak’ in the sense of ‘drunkard’ in the surface reading, I surmised that his innate deviousness meant that it was more likely to be a verb in the wordplay, so RET was my choice. Between TER??? and ???TER, the latter seemed more promising, and adding TER to the end of a word for a cask (or a peg or nail) gave me the first themed word, together with a good idea of what the link to the others would be.

19, ‘Fish that’s not cooked inside, sent back (6)’ came next, a reversal (‘sent back’) of a three-letter word for ‘not cooked’ reversed (‘sent back’) inside a common three-letter fish, confirming my suspicions. I guessed 1 immediately from the ‘Pop, poorly’ anagram, and although the thematic item at 38 was slightly less familiar, the wordplay was clear enough – a five-letter word meaning ‘subordinate’ inside a three-letter acronym for a special forces unit of the British Army which shares its motto with Derek Trotter.

Since the Playfair code phrase can have no repeated letters, the eleven letter (plural) word that links the four thematic items sprang readily to mind. The abbreviation took a little longer, but when it came to me I was able to write the thirteen-letter (2,11) code phrase into a 5×5 square and encode the four thematic solutions into the grid. Happily they fitted with a few other solutions that I’d put in there while I was trying to think of that second word!

No code cracking required, thankfully. Incidentally, the unchecked letters in 1 are B and U, in 19 GK, in 25 EC, and in 38 A and F.

Playfair Puzzles

The only real option with a Playfair puzzle that provides no hints to the code phrase is to solve the non-Playfair clues to get all of the checked letters in the Playfair solutions (or at the very least the pairs of letters which are both checked in the grid, but don’t forget that you can draw conclusions even from an incomplete quartet), work out the non-encoded answers to the Playfair clues, and then create quartets by relating the checked letter pairs from the encoded answers to the corresponding pairs in the non-coded solutions (eg solution = SOLVED, part completed light in grid = J?TPAG, LV encodes to TP and ED encodes to AG, while SO encodes to J?).

There are probably lots of ways to move forward from there, but I tend to look at the pairs of letters that (assuming the quartet represents a rectangle) are going to be in the same row (in my example L and T, V and P, E and A, D and G, S and J) and those that will be in the same column (in my example, L and P, V and T, E and G, D and A, O and J) and then link with other pairs (so if I find that L and P are in the same column and P and S are in the same column, I know that L, P and S are all in one column). And if I find that a group of letters (L, P and S, say) appear to be in both the same row and the same column? Then we are looking at a line and not a rectangle, so wherever any two of those letters appear as a pair on either side of an encoding, all four letters in that encoding are in the same row or column – so if L, P and S appear to be in the same row and the same column, and LP->IK, then L, P, I, K and S are all in the same row/column and I is (cyclically) to the right of or below L, K to the right of or below P. Oh yes, and Z is probably in the bottom right hand corner!

To which I will add a couple of points:

1. If a letter appears on both sides of an encoding, ie DR encodes to RI, that means that the letters (here D, R and I) appear consecutively in a specific sequence (cyclically) in the same line (could be either a row or a column) – for AB->BC the sequence is ABC (so in the example, DRI), for AB->CA the sequence is BAC.

2. If you can find all the letters in cyclic sequence within a column, eg SBLYU, remember that the letters which don’t appear in the code word are listed alphabetically at the end of the square, so it is likely that at least two, and potentially three, of the letters in the column will be part of this ‘remainder’; therefore they will occur in alphabetical sequence at the end of the column. And not only is Z likely to be in the bottom right-hand corner, but some of its near neighbours at the end of the alphabet will also be on the bottom row.

For a Playfair puzzle to be solvable, the encoded solutions must be obtainable without the help of any checked letters, and the clues for the intersecting words (showing the coded letters) cannot be too difficult (particularly if they only have one checked letter apart from the coded ‘checks’). There was nothing in this crossword that broke those rules.

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 2,565 Plain

Difficulty rating: (4 / 5)

A plain puzzle with a generous dollop of tricky wordplays and a couple of solutions that I don’t recall encountering previously. I think that a newcomer to Azed would have found this a tough introduction.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clue 8d, “One’s anti being badly treated in centrepiece of will being restricted to some heirs only” (6, 2 words). A particularly nasty phrase to define, but the point of interest here is in the wordplay, where an anagram (‘being badly treated’) of ANTI is contained by the letters in the middle (‘centrepiece’) of ‘will’. But what, you might ask, is the “One’s” at the start of the clue doing? In terms of the wordplay, the answer is nothing; although it is superfluous (the clue works perfectly well without it) Azed has included it in order to improve the surface reading. It is deceptive, too, in that the surface reading suggests that it should be interpreted as ‘One is’, but the cryptic reading requires it to be read as ‘One has’, ie ‘One [the solver] has ANTI* in (w)IL(l)’. This is dangerously close to the type of verbiage prohibited by Ximenean principles, and I know at least one editor who would remove the first word in this clue as soon as look at it.

1a Sailing by most direct route, I’d moor with short cable (not like a seaman!) roughly (12)
To get things going, an anagram (‘roughly’) of I’D MOOR and SHORT CABLE without ABLE (‘not like a seaman!’).

13a Large mouldings on front of Ichikawa temple gateway (5)
The first letter (‘front’) of Ichikawa follows a four-letter plural of a five-letter word for a large moulding, but unless you know that word you may be reliant on crossing letters to reach the solution; it is perhaps more familiar as the shape associated with doughnuts (the sort beloved of Homer Simpson, not the kind memorably described in song by Bob Marley as “Wi’ jam in”).

15a Alternative to test, no good – excessive snorting! (5)
An Azed favourite for the first part of the wordplay, ‘Alternative to test’ being used in a cricketing context to indicate a one-day international, specifically the usual three-letter abbreviation thereof. I felt that the definition required a question mark rather than an exclamation mark in order to indicate that excessive snorting was an example of the solution.

17a A wee dram? Likely to refuse one whenever received (4)
Chambers offers two words for ‘dram’ which fit with the checked letters. Azed has given an indication of which should be selected by his addition of ‘wee’, suggesting the Scottish variant. And the wordplay confirms this, a two-letter word meaning ‘whenever’ being received by a two-letter abbreviation meaning ‘abstaining totally from alcoholic drink’ (‘Likely to refuse one’, ie likely to refuse a wee dram).

18a Moony by nature, embracing skittish Elaine (8)
The skittish Elaine is embraced by a two-letter abbreviation for secundam naturam (‘by nature’), which by ornithological analogy might be termed a rare migrant – one reason for this being that  when Seneca wrote Idem est beate vivere et secundum naturam, he surely meant something along the lines of ‘It is the same to live happily and in conformity with nature’; it seems quite a stretch to interpret the phrase – ‘according to nature’ according to Chambers –  as ‘by nature’.

27a Diver heading off to sniff behind shipload? (8)
The first letter must be removed from (‘heading off’) a four-letter word meaning ‘to sniff’ (or the thing you do the sniffing with) that follows a five-letter word for a ship’s load.

29a Wild Asian ox? Could be 6 such (4)
A composite anagram &lit, where the letters of ASIAN OX can be rearranged to form (‘could be’) SIX (‘6’) plus the solution. I think that most crossword editors would insist that the ‘6’ in the clue should be written as ‘six’ on the basis that all the elements of an anagram should be visible to the solver.

34a Contents of jazz mag, piano number about squaddies (5)
‘Jazz mag’ as a slang term for a pornographic magazine appears only in recent editions of Chambers; Wiktionary suggests that it is specifically Northumbrian slang (!). The wordplay involves three abbreviations – a two-letter one for non-commissioned soldiers (‘squaddies’) inside shorthand forms of ‘piano’ and ‘number’.

2d It adorns garden? Right, what Horace urged us to pluck (6)
Had Horace wanted us to ‘seize the day’, he would surely have written ‘cape diem’, ‘carpe diem’ means ‘pluck the day’, presumably because it is ripe. Which comes to pretty much the same thing as ‘seize the day’, but Azed, with his lexicographer’s regard for detail, has opted for the more precise translation of Horace’s words. The R for ‘Right’ is therefore followed by the Latin word for ‘today’.

4d Measure? Opener missing, preserve Scotch (4)
A five-letter measure of distance, equating to the length of a cricket pitch, has its first letter removed (‘opener missing’) to produce a Scots word which means ‘to preserve’ or ‘to spare’.

7d A lost Mennonite book of scripture (short) – it’s observed by rabbis? (7)
Azed is inclined on occasion to miss out punctuation where I feel the wordplay demands it. Here the solver must infer a comma between ‘lost’ and ‘Mennonite’, because a five-letter adjective relating to a strict US Mennonite sect must have its A removed (from the start); the three-letter abbreviation for [the book of] Nahum follows.

9d See Times holding a payment up for purveyor of old news? (6)
The letter of the alphabet represented by ‘See’ and the single letter used as the symbol of multiplication (‘Times’) are the bookends for (‘holding’) a reversal (‘up’) of A plus a three-letter word for ‘payment’. The old news purveyor is no more, but indelibly etched on my brain are the page numbers 301 (sport headlines), 302 (football) and 340 (cricket).

12d Pheasant and so on we butchered? Could be this, what? (10, 2 words)
Another composite anagram &lit, here a rearrangement (‘butchered’) of PHEASANT and SO ON WE could produce the solution (‘this’) plus WHAT. The whole clue provides a rather satisfactory definition of the solution.

21d Like forks, defective, wife left out in hamper (7)
A five-letter word for ‘defective’ with the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘wife’ removed (‘wife left out’) is contained by a three-letter word for a hamper, rarely observed in the wild but often to be seen within the captivity of a 12×12 grid.

25d Is it in part dealt with (bit of pile going) before end of day? (6)
An &lit, albeit not of class 1 quality. The wordplay is a charade of IN, an anagram (‘dealt with’) of PART without the P (‘bit of pile going’), and the last letter of ‘day’ (‘end of day’). The solution is hyphenated, (2-4); the fact that the IN taken directly from the clue forms the first part of the compound is a long way from ideal.

26d Number without verve I’ve abandoned to do with agent? (6)
The same abbreviation for ‘number’ that appeared in 34a is followed by a seven-letter word for ‘without verve’ from which the letters IVE have been removed (“I’ve abandoned”). The question mark is necessary because the definition is by example.

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,564 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3 / 5)

A puzzle which seemed to me to sit slightly beyond the mid-point of the difficulty range, containing just one ‘hidden’ and a relatively low (for Azed) proportion of anagrams.

I have been producing these notes in their current form for a while, and I would appreciate any feedback that readers can offer on the format and content. One area of particular interest to me is the level of explicitness which you would like to see; I am conscious of the fact that “a two-letter word for a cow” and “the usual abbreviation for ‘latitude'” don’t improve the readability of the parsings. Would you prefer to see “OX (‘cow’)” and “L (latitude)”? Or would you rather that I stuck with the ‘n-letter words’ but explicitly showed the single letters? All views on this and any other aspect which might be improved will be very welcome.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at 22a, “Search in e.g. Chambers for describing table for distinguishing variables (6)”. Nothing too special about this double-definition clue, and the Chambers definition of ‘lookup’, which should surely read ‘denoting a table giving a set of possible values for a variable’, has done Azed no favours, but the interest lies in the first definition, that of ‘look up’ (two words). Of the grammatical errors which I see in clues a significant number are the result of setters ignoring (or not understanding) the difference between a transitive (object) and an intransitive (no-object) verb, with a verb of one type being used to indicate a verb of the other type either in the definition or as part of the wordplay. It is a particular issue with compound verbs, eg ‘look up’. In the clue here we have the verb ‘search’, which does have a transitive form, but its object is the place searched, not the thing sought; so ‘Search in e.g. Chambers’ will not do for ‘look up’ (try making up a sentence that uses one and then swap it for the other), and hence Azed has added the word ‘for’. Since ‘search for’ and ‘look up’ are synonymous only in a specific sense of the latter, Azed has flagged this by qualifying ‘search for’ with ‘in e.g. Chambers’. The result: an accurate indication of the solution.

12a Cuddly toy? Baby’s first, what one finds mother’s in front of (5)
The first letter of ‘Baby’, followed by a four-letter word which, when it has “mother’s” in front of it, indicates the sort of alcoholic beverage found at 5d. The way that Azed has constructed the last part of the clue is an object lesson in coming up with a combination of words that is grammatically sound both in the surface reading and the wordplay.

14a/15a Argument to add when dividing… (7) / …Side falling out including amateur plans (5)
The ellipsis here requires the first three words of the second clue to be shared with the first, ie the latter becomes “Argument to add when dividing side falling out”, instructing the solver to insert  a three-letter word meaning ‘to add’ into an anagram (‘falling out’) of SIDE. The second clue is ‘as seen’, another anagram of SIDE, this one including the usual abbreviation of ‘amateur’. Some editors are happy with ‘over’ as a containment indicator; personally, I would never use it and it looks as though Azed won’t either, because it would have worked very nicely here in place of ‘including’ in the  second clue.

24a Rare melody, contralto’s resort (6)
The single-letter abbreviation for ‘contralto’ is followed by a word for a resort or den; the whole is a rare spelling of a familiar word.

25a Requiring more scratchings, I ordered thrice (7)
A lovely definition. I think that ‘ordered’ is probably acceptable to most solvers as an indication of an anagram, but I don’t like it myself – the letters of any word are already in the order that produces that word, and I don’t think that ‘ordered’ suggests that the existing order should be changed, though I realize that I am probably in a small minority on this. I would have preferred “…I reordered thrice”, which I think reads equally well. I would also be happy with ‘…I strangely ordered thrice’ or something of that ilk.

Incidentally, when ‘scratchings’ started being sold in pubs I was surprised to find that they were a pork product; to me, scratchings were what our local chip shop in Redditch would sell you (in generous measure) inside a cone of paper for a penny, they being the bits of cooked batter from the bottom of the fryer. Probably somewhere south of a deep-fried Mars bar in the healthy food ratings, but absolutely delicious…I can still remember the taste – mmmmm. Thinking of pork scratchings, and the discussions which I recall taking place on occasion regarding the likely origin of ones with particularly interesting shapes, I am reminded of what must be the archest advertising slogan of all time, Peperami’s brilliant “It’s a bit of an animal”.

33a Old refrain from Italian city about a snake (9)
A five-letter Italian city is set around NAGA (a snake, especially the cobra) to produce an archaic term for a refrain.

4d Regular speed merchant – or not, one assumes (5)
NOT could be indicated in a down clue by ‘ton up’.

5d Kitty would do for this traditional gin regaining popularity (6, 2 words)
‘Kitty’ could (just about) serve as an indication of the solution, which is the name of a kind of sweetened gin popular in the nineteenth century and now enjoying a resurgence, I understand, associated with the ‘Craft Cocktail’ movement.

7d Junkie, how one might describe Cressida? (8)
Dame Cressida Dick leads Metropolitan Police Service, so she might be described (inter alia) as ‘a CID head’.

8d Star of Oliver!, say? I’ll give way to musical’s No. 2 in dance (4)
A four-letter dance (a version of which can be done with the hands) has its I ‘giving way to’ (replaced by) the second letter of ‘musical’. The solution describes the sort of performer who would be playing Oliver.

16d Clapper of course interrupting music coming up is thrown out (8)
A five-letter adjective meaning ‘of [a] course’ or ‘of a cycle of duty’ going inside (‘interrupting’) a reversal (‘coming up’) of MUSIC, from which the IS is removed (‘is thrown out’); the clue makes it clear that the ‘coming up’ precedes the ‘throwing out’.

23d Dumpling, triangular piece turning up in pastry dish (not English) (6)
The triangular piece which must be inverted (‘turning up’)  within a three-letter word for a pastry dish from which the E has been removed (‘not English’) is GORE, a triangular piece let into a garment to widen it (I have every confidence that regular commenter Orange will have been familiar with the word; I’m afraid that gussets and darts represent the limit of my knowledge in this area).

24d This, on being processed, produces colorant (6)
A composite anagram &lit where the letters of the solution (‘This’) and ON can be rearranged (‘processed’) to produce COLORANT. I think there are a couple of problems related to the punctuation here. The second comma, whilst required by the surface reading, makes the wordplay decidedly iffy; worse, the first comma divides up the anagram material into two elements which means that the verb ‘produce’ should be in a plural form. I think the clue would be fine without the commas.

28d Vintage table wine, half disposed of (4)
An eight-letter French claret loses its last four letters (‘half disposed of’), resulting in an obsolete (‘Vintage’) version of a word that is invariably spelt with five letters these days.

30d It’s pouched – in more ways than one (4)
A kind of double definition, exploiting the fact that the solution is not just a unit of currency but also a species of large kangaroo. When embarking on a trip to Europe, it is important to acquire the correct sort.

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,563 Plain

Difficulty rating: (3.5 / 5)

The ratio of tricky clues to straightforward ones seemed quite high, so I’ve rated it somewhere above average difficulty, even though none of the solutions was particularly tough to parse once you’d got the answer. I felt that Azed had pushed the envelope more times than an indecisive sorting office worker, resulting in considerably more quibbles than usual.

Setters’ Corner: This week I’m going to take a look at clue 29d, “Cry of pain let loose by nithing? (4)”. This clue is parsed in the notes below, but what interested me was Azed’s choice for the final word, prompting me to consider the alternatives. Having decided that OW was to be removed from YELLOW, with the whole clue providing a definition of YELL, the question would be how to indicate ‘yellow’. ‘Wimp’, say, would work in the surface, but while ‘yellow’ means ‘wimpish’, it doesn’t mean ‘[a] wimp’, so we need a word which can function as an adjective in the wordplay and a noun in the clue when read as a whole. ‘Chicken’ seems like an excellent option until we review the &lit definition – a cry of pain let loose by a chicken would never be described as a ‘yell’. ‘Craven’ fits the bill, but these days it is almost exclusively used as an adjective, and ‘…let loose by craven’ looks very unconvincing.  The obvious choice would be ‘coward’, which is normally seen as a noun but is also an adjective, however Azed has decided instead to use the historical term ‘nithing’, which would have more appeal if ‘yell’ had itself been an obsolete or archaic word. The presence of the letters OW in ‘coward’ (such that ‘letting loose’ OW would produce CARD) is an unwelcome distraction, but knowing Azed’s propensity towards less common words, I suspect he would have preferred ‘nithing’ to ‘coward’ in any event.

1a Scottish bum, placed askew – he drank heavily (9)
If, like me, you were unfamiliar with the Scottish bum or the (6-3) solution, you may have needed a checker or two to get this one, which involves FUD (‘Scottish bum’) being followed by an anagram (‘askew’) of PLACED.

7a Old master having something to get barbecue going? Not quite (3)
An eight-letter word for a North American wood used as a fuel in barbecuing has the letters QUITE removed (from the end) to produce the answer.

12a Very drunk, ultimately blotto as usual (6)
A charade of a two-letter word meaning ‘very’, a three-letter word for ‘drunk’ and the last letter (‘ultimately’) of ‘blotto’, the result being a musical term taken directly from the Italian language.

16a Salad ingredient, great with eggs around (7)
A four-letter word for ‘great’, in the sense of ‘important’, has the usual three-letter word for ‘eggs’ outside (‘around’).

19a Hot stuff disowned by band, not pro (6)
Here a ten-letter word for stuff which is (loosely) ‘hot’ has the consecutive letters BAND removed (‘disowned by band’) to produce a preposition (and adverb) that is the opposite of ‘pro’. A rather weak clue by Azed’s standards, given that the solution is the stem of the wordplay element from which it is extracted.

23a Male interrupting girl playfully is offensive (6)
A two-letter word for a male being contained by (‘interrupting’) a ‘playfully pejorative name for a child or a girl’ (or a familiar name for a cat). I was a bit dubious about the definition here, but Chambers gives ‘offensive’ as ‘making the first attack’, so I think it’s just about ok. Just about.

31a Wife on reflection to long for 2, 3 or 4? (4)
A three-letter, jocular word for a wife (referring to the genesis of Eve) reversed (‘on reflection’) is followed by a setter’s favourite for ‘to long’. The definition exploits the fact that ‘par’ for holes on a normal golf course can be 3, 4 or 5.

32a Little old coin, Sun King’s No. 2 on face (8)
A three-letter word for the Sun personified, the second letter of ‘King’ (“King’s No. 2”) and a four-letter word that means ‘to face’ in the sense of ‘defy’.

34a Silt swirling with rains near on our roads (9)
I feel that Azed could have omitted the ‘on our roads’ given the Chambers definition of the solution; as it stands, if the solver lives in a country where one drives on the right hand side of the road the qualification may be more confusing than helpful.

2d Sheep roaming wild catches cow up in the manner of a mate (7)
A five-letter word for a Himalayan wild sheep contains a reversal (‘up’) of two-letter word for a cow. I’m not happy about the definition here: ‘of a mate’ would be absolutely fine, but ‘in the manner of a mate’ surely defines an adverb (eg ‘uxorially’) rather than an adjective.

5d For best effect it requires keeping one’s hand in? Blimey, I think not (5)
A three-letter interjection meaning ‘Blimey!’ is followed by a two-letter word for ‘I think not’. I bow to Azed’s musical knowledge when accepting that the solution describes the sort of French horn that is played using a hand-stopping technique.

9d Marine creature, live when caught by tail (8, 2 words)
Two-letter words for ‘live’ and ‘when’ are contained (‘caught’) by a four-letter word for ‘tail’ in the sense of [the] posterior.

15d Old philosopher, form of stoic absorbing what’s current in Cambridge (8)
It is CAM which here is ‘absorbed’ by an anagram of (‘form of’) STOIC. Whether the river that flows through Cambridge can legitimately be described as “what’s current in Cambridge” is a moot point; based on the Chambers definition, ‘current’ here must be a noun – the meaning ‘a stream’ might just about make it legit.

21d Copy page in antique, its first (7)
The usual abbreviation for ‘page’ inside a five-letter word for [an] antique, with the first letter of ‘antique’ (‘its first’) bringing up the rear.

26d Wild flower, green and pale (5)
The wordplay here requires that ‘green means go’, which I suppose you could argue that it does for road users. The three-letter word for ‘pale’ which follows is a favourite of setters.

27d A bit like Jaques’s schoolboy, beginning to lick inside cone (4)
The ‘cone’ which contains the first letter of ‘lick’ (‘beginning to lick’) is PUY, a small volcanic cone, specifically one in Auvergne. The reference is to Jaques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech from As You Like It, which includes the following:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

29d Cry of pain let loose by nithing? (4)
An &lit to finish off, with OW (the cry of pain in the wordplay) being ‘let loose’ by YELLOW (‘nithing’ as an adjective), to produce a word which could be indicated by the clue as a whole (where ‘nithing’ functions as a noun).

(definitions are underlined)

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 2,562 Plain

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 5)

A 13×11 puzzle which seemed to be pretty close to the middle of the difficulty spectrum. I had a couple of minor quibbles, but nothing to get too het up about.

Setters’ Corner: This week I take my prompt from 9d, which (apart from the use of ‘produce’ rather than ‘provide’) is Norah Jarman’s brilliant first prize winner from Ximenes competition 743 (April 1963). A superb wordsmith, she won thirty-seven prizes in Ximenes and Azed comps between 1945 and 1983; when cryptic definition clues without supporting wordplay were allowed in barred puzzles she wrote some of the best (eg ‘Naughty type of Limerick’ for SPALPEEN, X202), but she was equally good at conventional definition/wordplay clues, such as the one reproduced here by Azed and

 [su_spoiler title=’Like Eve – “Me with only one ragged leaf to wiggle about in” (6)’]FEMALE [ME< in LEAF*][/su_spoiler]

Surprisingly, she only achieved one VHC or better in Printer’s Devilry competitions, but the one in question was this extraordinary effort from AZ57 (April 1973):

 [su_spoiler title=’Bunter whine starts with jaw open: “Cease – condone – Wharton, please!” (7)’]MINARET [Bunter whines: “Tarts with jam in are twopence – a second one, Wharton, please”][/su_spoiler]

Finally my personal favourite, Norah’s winning entry for Ximenes comp 1140 (November 1970):

 [su_spoiler title=’Alien to Ruth, like the corn” (7)’]CALLOUS [ruth=pity, ref Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale: “Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home / She stood in tears amid the alien corn”][/su_spoiler]

1a Resinous stuff to polish from behind with spraying device on fashioned diptych (13, 2 words)
A three-letter word meaning ‘to polish’ is reversed, the sort of spraying device you might use when repainting a car comes next, and an anagram (‘fashioned’) of DIPTYCH brings up the rear, ccompleting a solution of the form (8,5).

10a Upset a bath with last of water in (7)
Using ‘a’ to indicate PER is a device often used by setters (myself included!) – here it is followed by a three-letter word for a bath with the last letter of ‘water’ inserted.

15a Mixture of strong beers packed quite a punch (6)
The second indication of the solution may not be familiar to younger solvers, but in the 1960s Henry Cooper was perhaps the most famous sportsman in England. Born in Lambeth in 1934, he started boxing in 1949 and in 1954 (together with his twin brother George) he turned professional. His first fight with Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) was the stuff of legend, Cooper felling Clay in the fourth round with a left hook to the jaw, a punch known as “‘Enry’s ‘Ammer”. The first person to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award twice, he was undefeated in British heavyweight title fights from 1959 until his final (highly controversial) defeat at the hands of Joe Bugner in 1971; it is unlikely that the gulf in public affection between the two fighters has been matched by two British boxers before or since. Following his retirement from the sport, he became one of the initial team captains on A Question of Sport, and he was much in demand for public appearances for the remainder of his life . He was awarded a knighthood in 2000, the only boxer ever to have received that honour.

17a Plunge in like active boxers? That’s invigorating (8)
ENEW (‘Plunge in’) is seen inside [the] RING (‘like active boxers’). Strictly speaking, ‘enew’ means to plunge into the water, but I think that ‘the water’ can reasonably be inferred,

19a Hanging of old, something that stops lives (5)
A three-letter word for a stopper (‘something that stops) plus a two-letter word meaning ‘lives’ make up an obsolete word for a hanging or tapestry taken directly from the French language.

28a Dramatic heroine given latitude in court bench introducing explosive stuff (7)
The usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘latitude’ is contained by a four-letter word for the judges’ bench (Français, encore) and a two-letter abbreviation for High Explosive. The solution is the first name of Mrs Grey, née DuBois, in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. The part was written for Tallulah Bankhead, but was originally played on Broadway by Jessica Tandy; Vivien Leigh took the role in the original West End production, and reprised it in the film with Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, and the little-known (at that time) Marlon Brando. Bankhead finally got the chance to have a crack at it in 1956 – the critics were divided over her performance, but Williams was impressed. Bankhead was something of a ‘character’ – her penchant for eschewing underwear caused so may complaints from audience members when she appeared in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of our Teeth that Equity was forced to intervene, and when she appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat the director famously deliberated over whether he should refer the issue to the make-up or hairdressing department.

35a Imagines being found singly caught in pincers, feet damaged, tense (13)
Even in noisy surroundings this clue could plainly be heard shouting out ‘Azed’. ‘Imagines’ is one of the plural forms of ‘imago’, and therefore with ‘Imagines being found singly’ Azed is telling us that the definition is ‘imago’; the wordplay requires the standard abbreviation for caught to be placed inside an anagram (‘damaged’) of PINCERS FEET, with the abbreviation for tense at the end. Whether ‘X being found singly’ is the same as ‘the singular form of X’ I leave you to decide for yourselves.

1d The old scrawl on version of Serb bible inscribed by Catholic (10)
An anagram of (‘version of’) SERB BIBLE, containing a C for Catholic, but I don’t think that ‘inscribed by’ is legitimate to indicate insertion of what follows – it introduces the agent of the inscription, not the thing inscribed, for which ‘inscribed with’ would be required. The Claret Jug at Royal St George’s will today be inscribed with the name of the winner of the Open Championship, not by it.

3d Lacking a tin, dividing up fruit (6)
A ten-letter word meaning ‘dividing’ has the letters A TIN removed (‘Lacking a tin) before being reversed (‘up’).

7d Ride around this meadowland will get place affording best views? (4)
If the letters of RIDE were set around the solution, the result would be a place to get close-up views of action such as ‘Enry at 15 and the protagonists at 17 might have produced.

8d Part of Africa supplying dress, old, for taking away (4)
Two definitions sandwiching the wordplay, a three-letter word meaning [to] dress and the usual abbreviation for old. Arguably the second ‘definition’ is a second wordplay, since its enumeration is (2,2) rather than (4).

9d I produce something you can rattle up and down in a box (7)
A very slight variation on Norah Jarman’s classic clue from 1963, a two-letter designation of something that you might ‘rattle up and down’ in a motor vehicle is contained by a five-letter word for a box, the whole clue serving as a lovely indication of the solution.

22d Palm tree: excrescence on it is reduced by half (6)
A three-letter word for an excrescence (on a tree) more often seen with its last letter repeated is followed by (‘on’) IT and the letter I (‘is reduced by half’).

27d Cadenzas, maybe strong except for the end (4)
A five-letter word for ‘strong’ or ‘substantial’ has its final letter removed (‘except for the end’) to produce the Italian plural form of a word which could describe, inter alia, a cadenza (‘Cadenzas, maybe’).

29d State touching US state to the north (4)
The two-letter word which Chambers describes as ‘commercial jargon’ for ‘concerning’ or ‘touching’ together with the two-letter abbreviation for a particular (southeastern) US state, the combination being reversed (‘to the north’).

30d Pud that was iced initially found in napkin holder (4)
The first letter of ‘iced’ (‘iced initially’) is contained by (‘found in’) a three-letter word for an ornamental holder for a knife, fork or table napkin, often in the form of a ship (hence the name, the French word for a nave, derived from the Latin ‘navis’, a ship). A ‘pud’ is a word for a fist, as is the solution, but the latter is shown by Chambers as ‘archaic, hence the ‘Pud that was’, ie ‘Pud in the past’.

(Definitions are underlined)