EV 1716 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1716 (Hints)

Puzzle by Arcadia

Hints and tips by Phibs

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I gave Claude as much information as I could glean from the preamble: “In a themed crossword puzzle, we are told that we must highlight cells in a block in the completed grid which cryptically represent a puzzle referred to by an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. What might this puzzle be?” Good luck with that, matey…

Claude remained unfazed despite the rather vague brief.

“I need to think about what kind of puzzle would be referenced in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and represented by highlighting cells in a completed crossword grid.

The most famous puzzle that fits this description is the Tower of Hanoi (or Tower of Brahma). This puzzle appears in quotations because of its association with a legend about monks in a temple who must move 64 golden disks from one tower to another following specific rules, and when they complete the task, the world will end. In a crossword context, highlighting cells to form a pattern would likely show:

Three vertical towers (columns of highlighted squares)
Disks of varying widths stacked on these towers

The visual representation in the grid would cryptically depict the puzzle’s structure – three pegs with disks of different sizes that need to be moved from one peg to another.

However, another strong possibility could be the Riddle of the Sphinx if the highlighted cells form a sphinx shape, as this famous riddle (“What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?”) is certainly quoted in reference works.”

I suspect that Claude doesn’t own a copy of ODQ.

Preamble: In the final grid solvers must highlight all bar one cell in a block, which together cryptically represent a PUZZLE (in ODQ), and write the PUZZLE’s name (six letters) below the grid. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

Here we have something of a novelty – our only task before we get to the endgame is to fill the grid. This means I don’t even get the chance to write a clue for ARCADIA.

Note: although the word PUZZLE appears capitalized in the clues for 1d and 22d, I don’t believe that there is any material connection between their answers and the theme.

Across

16a  Mundane anxiety, losing heart about bad cholesterol (7)
A five-letter synonym for ‘anxiety’ loses its heart before consuming that ‘bad cholesterol’ (an abbreviation for a certain type of protein).

17a  Ed’s easily shorn ram (4)
A six-letter castrated ram is shorn of its outer coat; an alternative wordplay would be ’empty air lacking resistance’. ‘Ed’ is of course Edmund Spenser.

19a  Once fancy diet exposed sausage to New Yorkers (6)
If you don’t know the obsolete word meaning ‘fancy’, then the word DIET once it’s been ‘exposed’ (ie deprived of cover) and the definition should enable you to work it out.

25a  Principal border marks exits (4)
The ‘border’ is the singular form of a word usually seen in the plural, the Welsh ones being particularly well known.

36a  Chaste girl ageing subtly, when finally “out” (5)
When you see ‘girl’, ‘boy’, ‘woman’ or ‘man’ in a clue preceded by a qualitative adjective like ‘chaste’, there’s a good chance that it will lead to an entry in the ‘Some first names’ appendix of Chambers, with the meaning of the name given there roughly corresponding to the adjective. Hence ‘mild man’ is ‘Clement’, and the ‘chaste girl’ here is a diminutive form of a name meaning ‘chaste’. The last letter of a word in the clue must be removed from the anagram fodder.

Down

2d  Country club closes, bordering going concern (6)
The ‘country club’ is a somewhat whimsical way of indicating a two-letter abbreviation, while the six-letter ‘closes’ is a noun far more often seen as a verb meaning ‘stops’ or ‘desists from’.

3d  Induce to back one’s money up-front (6)
The first two words of the wordplay provide two letters of the answer, the third provides three, and last two yield one letter to be put before all the others (‘up-front’).

5d  Quite tuneful northern tongue’s depth is alien (8)
The appearance of ‘quite’ (or ‘somewhat’ etc) before an adjective suggests that the resultant word will have a particular group of three letters at the end, and so it proves here. The wordplay involves one letter in a word indicated by ‘northern tongue’ being replaced by a pair of letters.

7d  Verdant lassie children in Peebles love (5)
Regarding the definition, I would refer solvers to my comment on 36a above… The wordplay has a two-letter abbreviation preceding a Scots form of a word in the clue.

18d  E-learning sessions on entropy people generally mostly doubled up (8)
There needs to be a comma between ‘entropy’ and ‘people’ here, because a single-letter abbreviation goes underneath a two-letter word answering to ‘people generally’ and most of a six-letter word indicated by ‘doubled up’ (or ‘twofold’).

20d  Sale of old masters including Van Gogh? (7)
The wordplay features an obsolete word for a sale and a three-letter abbreviation. I’m not convinced that any sense of the word ‘master’ justifies its use as a containment indicator.

23d  Barbary sheep, a noisy youngster repeatedly out of line (6)
A (1,4,3) phrase corresponding to ‘a noisy youngster’ loses multiple individual instances of a single letter.

28d  Midges in Highlands jab rears! (5)
What’s ‘rearing’ here is a Scots version of the sort of ‘jab’ that a wasp might deliver.

32d  Snubbed previously untouchable artist (4)
You may have to work back from the Spanish surrealist to identify the term for “a member of the former untouchable class in India” that has lost its last letter.

34d  Lowlife taking prime locations in The Bell (4)
This clue contains a device which first appeared in a Times puzzle on 8 October 2005, so it has just celebrated its 20th birthday. The ‘prime’ refers to prime numbers.

Definitions in clues are underlined

Having filled the grid, the question is where to find the block. Just as when looking for a linear arrangement of cells a good place to begin is the ‘Chalicea Line’ (the leading diagonal), so the place to start looking for blocks is in rectangles from the centre of a puzzle outward. Once we can spot a word or two, the rest should fall into place, even if we can’t quite remember the order of things in the quotation. When it comes to the ‘name of the puzzle’, the full quotation is slightly ambiguous, but there is only one six-letter word which the setter could be referring to, and that is the word to be written under the grid. Highlight all the cells in the block except one, and it’s job done.

Some of the clues, particularly the down ones, were pretty tricky, but in the absence of gimmicks or unclued entries they shouldn’t have posed too many problems. The endgame was very neat, although it was a shame about that extra letter. Had the puzzle been Mango’s Listener 3977, City Tour (Tower of Hanoi), or Dysart’s Listener 4829, Bigfoot (The Riddle of the Sphinx), Claude would have scored a bull’s-eye. As it was, his second suggestion wasn’t, in one respect at least, too far wide of the mark.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾 (Some tricky clues, but suitable for all except barred puzzle novices)

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