EV 1742 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1742 (Hints)

Prime by Arcadia

Hints and tips by Phibs

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The name Arcadia immediately brings to my mind a shop in St. Michael’s Street, Oxford.

It had been (and may still be, though I’ve not been there for a little while) in the same ownership since the mid-1970s, and was notable in particular for its stock of second-hand paperbacks, many of them old Penguin editions in excellent condition, the PRIME examples all being enclosed in cellophane wrappers. An excellent shop, which I can’t recall leaving without having made a purchase of some kind. Has that got anything to do with today’s setter? Probably not. Perhaps he has devoted himself to the simple lifestyle enjoyed by the inhabitants of Arcadia (the district of ancient Greece, not the shop), involving plenty of singing and dancing (not to mention crossword setting). Or perhaps he is a regular traveller on the P&O cruise ship Arcadia, which offers ‘timeless style, from the art deco domed roof of the atrium and the glass-fronted lift to her sleek bars and opulent spa.’ Am I getting warm?

Preamble: In the 180º symmetrical grid, two unclued entries (each of 13 letters) give the names of an author and a sequel to their PRIME work. Cells illustrating a counterexample of a PRIME quotation from the work, involving a further unclued entry of four letters, must be highlighted (13 letters, three words). Clues are in normal order, the wordplay in PRIME examples leading to an extra letter, spelling out the name of a charitable trust. In the final grid solvers must change two letters and then highlight the trust’s initials, a novel and a publication (three, four and six letters respectively in straight lines), all of which were PRIME creations of the author. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

We have a carte blanche, and the clues are presented unnumbered in a single group. However, there is quite a lot that we can work out based on the answer lengths and the knowledge that the grid has 180° (normal) symmetry, such that (for instance) a vertical bar between cells 3 and 4 in the top row will be matched by a bar between cells 9 and 10 in the bottom row, and so on. The pattern of lengths of across answers (4, 7, 7…7, 7, 4) tells us that the across clues end with ‘Songbird with two different notes’, and there is a strong indication that the top and bottom rows will include an entry of four letters and an entry of seven letters (in reverse order for the bottom row), so the top row will be (1,4,7), (4,1,7) or (4,7,1) and the bottom row correspondingly (7,4,1), (7,1,4) or (1, 7, 4).The two 13-letter unclued answers must be down entries (the grid is 12 x 13), and it seems likely that given what else is going on they will be the perimeter entries; the third unclued entry is almost certainly at the centre of the middle row, and it will have an even number of letters.  The key is going to be solving a cluster of clues either at the start or the end of both the acrosses and downs, so we can work out how a few entries intersect in the relevant part of the grid. From that point, we can start to fill in bars and, with the help of the answer lengths, deduce the entire grid.

An added complexity is that there are several clues where the wordplay delivers an extra letter which does not contribute to the answer. If a clue were “Setter, eccentric person bursting into song (7)”, the wordplay leads to ARCARDIA (CARD in ARIA), the answer is ARCADIA, and the extra letter contributing to the name of the charitable trust is R. The preamble seems to suggest that the gimmicked clues are those for grid entries identified by prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7 etc), but that’s not much help when the clues and grid are unnumbered. Thankfully, however, the letters are to be read in normal clue order so the numbering is not critical. There are 41 grid entries and twelve prime numbers less than 41, one of those being 37, so the name will probably be either 11 or 12 letters long depending on how many pairs of across/down entries share an initial letter.

Clues

* Westerly banks of Nile leaving abrupt mass of vegetation (4)
The ‘westerly banks’ indicates that the outer letters (‘banks’) should be selected from a word in the clue, and then reversed (‘westerly’); the resulting letter pair is to be removed from a six-letter word.

 * Touch discarded Bostonian sleeper’s lingerie (7)
The wordplay involves a charade of a four-letter obsolete (hence the ‘discarded’) word meaning ‘to touch’ (more familiar as a poetic adverb meaning ‘near’) and a three-letter North American (‘Bostonian’) word for a railway sleeper. The answer is a word in more common use than those two, but it isn’t lingerie, and even if it were it would be an item of lingerie. The “sleeper’s” would help to qualify the definition, but it can only be part of wordplay.

* Setting for board appointee, briefly tense (8, two words)
The main element of the wordplay is an eight-letter term for ‘someone who has a ????? or office under a government, esp if gained by selfishness or ambition’; it must have the letter at the end replaced with a single-letter abbreviation. The answer is not itself a ‘setting’, rather something which might accompany an individual table setting.

* Much reduced rank in sticks (6)
The key here is spotting that ‘sticks’ is a verb meaning ‘pierces’, so the wordplay translates as ‘rank [that] IN [pierces]’. The definition doesn’t seem quite right – something like ‘even smaller’ would be more accurate.

* Keynote teaching of prophet showing no decline (4)
The seven-letter word for ‘[the] teaching of [a] prophet’ could also have been indicated by ‘an interpersonal communication’; it must be deprived of a three-letter word meaning ‘decline’. The answer is specifically the keynote used by any of the scales associated with the lyre.

* Dig out long recipe shared by Puritan (8)
The verb ‘share’ appears here with its sense of ‘cut’ or ‘cleave’, a five-letter word (which surrenders a ‘bonus’ letter) cutting into a three-letter verb, often indicated in cryptics by ‘long’, and a single-letter abbreviation.

* Choice Scots lament delivered (4)
The answer, a homophone (‘delivered’) of a familiar four-letter word meaning ‘[to] lament’, is a Scots word for the act of choosing.

* Songbird with two different notes (4)
You might think that the answer here was going to be a combination of two notes from the Julie Andrews songbook, but it is actually the result of just her drop of golden sun being bookended by a pair of single-letter abbreviations.

* Open plain isolating Spain (5)
I remember in my youth being intrigued by books of blank paper that were described as ‘narrow feint and margin’; the ‘plain’ here would describe paper that had no such embellishments, and it must lose both the IVR code for Spain and a bonus letter before the answer (a verb) is revealed.

* Wrongly holding back food in abrupt volte-face down under (7)
The ‘food [habitually consumed by a person or animal]’ produces a four-letter word which will surrender a bonus letter. It is followed by a two-letter word from the clue and a three-letter informal Australian term for a U-turn which gives up its last letter (‘abrupt’).

* Limitless measure controlling badgers and the rest (8, two words)
A six-letter ‘measure’ (and a name which describes a specific system of weights and measures) with its ‘limits’ removed contains (‘controlling’) the four-letter collective noun for a group of badgers. Be careful not to biff a phrase with a different last letter.

* Coniferous tree cut by South African highlander (5)
A five-letter coniferous tree of New Zealand containing a single-letter abbreviation loses a bonus letter, the result being the name for a member of an African people from the highlands of Kenya and Tanzania.

* Primitive urge to beat an aborigine’s shield (8)
I’m not sure how Shakespeare would feel about much of his language being described as ‘primitive’, but it is an ‘archaic or poetic’ verb meaning ‘to urge (on)’ which must be followed by a three-letter word for ‘to beat’ and a pair of letters from the clue.

* Wraps up classic film inspired by retro science fiction (5)
A ‘rare’ four-letter spelling of a word for a film, song etc which was produced a long time ago (frequently not a classic) surrenders the bonus letter after being ‘inspired’ by a reversal of a familiar two-letter abbreviation.

* Unionist, coarse cropped, lacking good throat-dangler! (5)
A single-letter abbreviation is followed by a six-letter word which suffers two losses, as indicated by ‘cropped’ and ‘lacking good’.

Definitions in clues are underlined

At some point during the process of accommodating all the clued answers in the grid, the two 13-letter unclued entries should have become clear; the name of the trust will also have been revealed. The author is known for one particular quotation, which is in ODQ (the preamble isn’t entirely clear on the point, but it comes from the ‘prime’ work, not the sequel). The place to start looking for an ‘illustration’ is clearly in the vicinity of the third unclued word, and you should quickly see how the illustration is a ‘counterexample’, or at least a contradiction, of the author’s famous assertion. Highlight those 13 cells, as well as the initials of the trust and the name of the author’s ‘prime’ novel, and then find a homophone for a regular ‘publication’ with which the author was closely associated. Change two letters (making one new crossing word in the process), and highlight the resultant six-letter word. The preamble doesn’t mention any need to add bars or numbers, so unless you want to confirm the numbers of the ‘extra letter’ clues it’s job done.

I’m not sure why the setter decided to make the puzzle a carte blanche, since it seemed to have no thematic relevance. The clues were pretty chewy given the format, but having filled the grid the remainder of the solve was relatively undemanding.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾🥾/🥾🥾🥾🥾🥾 (One for experienced barred puzzle solvers only)

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