Sunday Telegraph Cryptic No 2483 – Hints
Selected hints by Big Dave
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BD Rating – Difficulty *** – Enjoyment ****
Another Sunday puzzle to enjoy while sitting in the garden in the sunshine. I even forgave the setter for including the now obligatory place name!
For the weekend prize crosswords I will select a few of the better clues and provide hints for them. A full analysis of this puzzle will be available at 12.00 next Thursday, 14th May.
Some hints to get you started:
Across
1a Diamond, for example, that’s useful when dating (6)
Diamond is made of this element, and it’s a way of estimating the date of death of prehistoric organic material
5a Took control of a lot of characters in the first eleven (8)
This word meaning to illegally take control of, say, an aircraft is made up from eight of the first eleven letters of the alphabet
9a Value of magical device yielding part of our capital (10)
This London borough could be thought to be the value of a magical device wielded by a magician
11a In solitary, place limits on criminal (2,6)
This legendary American criminal comes from putting a word meaning to place limits on expenditure inside a synonym for solitary
13a Pack for America in part of ship (4)
What the Americans call a pack of cards is also the name of the part of a ship where passengers play games like quoits
18a Pay with tenner, say, for extra information (low-down) (8)
A word meaning to pay the bill is combined with a tenner, or maybe a fiver, to give the kind of extra information that can be found low down on the page
26a Chauvinistic types wrecking phoneboxes (10)
I just loved this anagram of PHONEBOXES
Down
2d Article difficult to believe in any way (2,3)
It doesn’t look like a charade at first, but it is! Take the indefinite article A together with a word meaning difficult to believe, as in such a story, to get a short phrase meaning in any way
3d Gamble about two guys providing cover for patient, perhaps (9)
This cover for a patient is what they might wear while sitting up in bed
6d One of many Popes with his edict for our representative (4,4)
Twenty three popes have had this name, add it to a Papal edict and you have a generic name for an Englishman that was invented by John Arbuthnot
16d Volatile star raves, upon being disturbed (9)
RAVES UPON is being disturbed here to give this volatile star
22d Prolific scorer, having extra time a lot (5)
This prolific scorer wrote music scores like the Brandenburg concertos; put him around the T of Time to get a lot of similar objects
24d Old prison ships (5)
This notorious old London prison is also the name for a number of ships
I really enjoyed this one, and I particularly liked 24 down!
Well thank goodness you came in from the sunshine to put in your hints!! We’ve been puzzling over 11 across for ages because the paper version of the crossword has it as an eight letter word – not 2,6!!