EV 1756 (Hints)

Enigmatic Variations 1756 (Hints)

Holy Anthem by Raffles

Hints and tips by Phibs

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Raffles is the name of the cricketer and gentleman thief created by Ernest Hornung, the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle.

AJ Raffles and his partner in crime Bunny Manders are the counterparts – on the other side of the law – to Holmes and Watson, with the stories about each luminary being narrated by their sidekick. Raffles was the inspiration for Steve Harley’s 1975 hit Mr. Raffles (Man, It Was Mean), about which he later said, “Raffles was a master thief. He was a con artist too. I use his name to invoke a religious allegory, yes. We see religion and its leaders in our own ways: Sham: ‘Man, it was mean to be seen in the robes you wore for Lent, you must’ve known that it was Easter.’ The Devil within: ‘Then in Amsterdam you were perfect fun. You never let on you had a gun and then you shot that Spanish Dancer.’ Truthfully, I always think these references and allusions are obvious to listeners, and it feels a little pretentious to explain.”

I’m glad that’s all been cleared up. But just how mean will Raffles turn out to have been today? We shall see…

Preamble: Read clockwise from 1, the perimeter gives relevant subjects and part of a quotation; unchecked letters could form HOLY ANTHEM FLEW. Applying the full quotation, solvers must replace a name featured in six contiguous cells with another, leaving only real words or names. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.

No clueing gimmicks, nothing funny about the entries, just a matter of filling the central part of the grid and working out the quotation, at which point we can turn our attention to the endgame.

Across

11a  Love European edge (4)
The first part of this 3+1 charade is a term of endearment, an informal shortened version of a five-letter word. The answer is a verb.

13a  Current in Jordan, perhaps, we hear? (4)
The answer here is a homophone for the diminutive name by which the Irishman who ran his own Formula 1 team between 1991 and 2005 was known. As a long-time follower of F1, I had no problem with this clue, but I wonder how many ‘less mature’ solvers will be aware of him.

17a  Bowl, possibly to toss spreads over, for example (5)
In the wordplay, a word meaning ‘to toss’ is contained by (‘spreads’) something that could certainly be indicated by ‘for example, over’ but surely not by ‘over, for example’ in the context of the cryptic reading as a whole. The definition refers to the shape of the sort of bowl associated with lawns, crown greens, carpets and alleys.

23a  One film character losing head and feet (5)
There are a lot of film characters to choose from, but this one’s chums were Thumper and Flower; a Roman numeral is followed by his name deprived of its first letter.

33a  The Spanish and the English leaving centre once let go (5)
The wordplay here doesn’t really work while ‘English’ is there – you need to mentally remove it and then put a three-letter definite article from a foreign language together with two letters from a word in the clue. The answer is a Spenserian form of a familiar word, hence the ‘once’.

Down

4d  What’s held in both hands where glass is heated (4)
A two-letter interjection corresponding to ‘what[?]’ is contained by the single-letter abbreviations for each of the two hands.

5d  Hope lowering top nets a bush (7)
The key element of the wordplay here is a word meaning ‘[to] hope’, the first letter of which is moved right to the end.

6d  One man with more chuckles? (5)
‘Man’ is perhaps a bit of a stretch for the word which appears first in the singular and then in the plural – ‘male’ (or ‘that man’) would be more accurate. Don’t forget that in barred puzzles hyphenated answers are enumerated as single words, so LINE-OUT would be shown as (7).

15d  English competing outfits getting protection (4)
The ‘competing outfits’ are the costumes worn by those playing judo or practising karate.

18d  Large amount of gold one’s taken for university (7)
A word for gold en masse has one letter replacing another to produce a word which indicates a large number (though not a large amount).

21d  Passages one translated into French following note about take (6)
The ‘one’ (loosely) translated into French is the three-letter stressed pronoun meaning ‘I’ or ‘me’, while the note is one that Julie Andrews reached very quickly.

24d  Modest local pub where sermons are given (6)
The first part of the 3+3 charade here is a ‘Scottish and dialect’ word meaning ‘demure’ or ‘prim’; Prince would surely have indicated it cryptically by ‘1999’.

25d  Web’s connections do round bread from Polynesia? (6)
An old representation of the first note of the scale and a four-letter Samoan currency unit are involved here. The answer is the name of a worldwide distributed discussion system, although it hasn’t got anything to do with the Web, which it predates by over a decade. For many, like myself, it really came into its own in the mid-1990s when the contents of the newsgroups were consolidated by Deja, the search capabilities of which transformed the task of IT problem solving.

26d  Islander’s beloved beer, the ale for beginners (5)
The wordplay here begins with a slightly old-fashioned informal term for ‘an alcoholic drink, especially a glass of beer’ (“We had a few ???s before the game”).

Definitions in clues are underlined

Once all the clued answers have been entered, either the quote will ‘jump out’ at you or, like me, you will have to piece it together. It should be possible to work out the first three words (6,4,4) and the four-letter word right at the end. Adding ‘quote’ and putting those words into Google (note: other search engines are available) should tell you all you need to know. Since the observation was originally made in German, there is no definitive translation (and it’s not in my seventh edition ODQ), but the version here is widespread on the web, including as it does two words of French (a rendering of the German ‘unter sich’).  The complete quotation should leave little doubt about the initial contents of the six cells (in a straight line) that you are looking for, or about to how to modify them, producing seven new words. Make those changes, check off the unch message against the unchecked perimeter letters (don’t forget the corners), and it’s job done.

The difficulty here lay largely in the clues, which showed libertarian tendencies and were tricky in places. I suspect that the quotation will have been new to many solvers, but the search facilities available on the web meant that the endgame should not have proved too challenging.

Phibs Toughness Rating : 🥾🥾🥾 (Suitable for anyone except barred puzzle novices)

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