Clock stopped at 15:41 for an interesting and not entirely straightforward puzzle - there was a lot of "Hmmm, that rings a bell" with some clues, and more than one answer went in without full understanding, only to be fully explained by a trip to the reference books after the event. Meanwhile, 5dn fell on completely the wrong side of my personal definition of general knowledge (see last blog), as did the bird in 18dn.
| Across |
|---|
| 1 | AGNOSTIC - (ACTINGSO)*. |
| 9 | LEANNESS - i.e. the girl ANNE is clothed in LESS. |
| 10 | COLD - L{eft} in COD. |
| 11 | METROPOLITAN - double def., the "capital line" being the part of the London Underground which runs all the way out to leafy Buckinghamshire, and the archbishop being an old rank of the Catholic and Eastern churches. |
| 13 | BORNEO - BORNE(="carried"), O(="round"); third-largest island in the world. Hands up if you, too, attempted to invent an island called something like BALORE... |
| 14 | IDEOGRAM - [O{ld} in MARGE(Simpson)], (Princess) DI, all reversed - those who decry the use of popular culture in crosswords won't have got past Wallis as Mrs S. |
| 15 | BMX BIKE - M{onsieur} inside B X B(the chess notation for one bishop taking another), IKE(General, later President, Eisenhower). I thought it must be BXB as soon as I saw it, but dismissed it because there was no way those letters could be incorporated into an answer in English... |
| 16 | CAVEMAN - CAVE(="hollow"), MAN(=chess piece such as the king). |
| 20 | ARRAIGNS - ARRAS(="hanging") around vIrGiN. |
| 22 | SPOORS - SPO{ns}ORS. |
| 23 | RIO DE JANEIRO - (IRONOREJADEI)*; not the Brazilian capital since 1960, of course, but very much so before then, and also still capital of the state of the same name. |
| 25 | UNIT - UNI{versity}, {studen}T. |
| 26 | CROSS EYE - CROSS(="angry"), EYE(="regard"). "Squint" is well down the list of possible meanings of "cast". |
| 27 | ROAD HOGS - (HASDROOG)*, where the estates are cars. If you're familiar with A Clockwork Orange, this is a tremendous surface (if you aren't, you're probably wondering what the hell a droog is meant to be). Horrorshow. |
| |
|---|
| Down |
|---|
| 2 | GLOW-WORM - W{ife} x2, R{un}, inserted into GLOOM, with "apart" indicating that they don't all go in together. |
| 3 | OLD MAN'S BEARD - OLD MAN(="husband"), S{mall}, BEARD (="imperial, maybe"; a style of beard popularised by Napoleon III, but probably all the rage in Hoxton right now). The plant is a type of clematis which I've learned from multiple appearances in crosswords. |
| 4 | TEXTBOOK - TEXT("somehow communicate with"), BOOK("reserve"). |
| 5 | CLOOTIE - C{aught} LOOT I.E.; well this was a new one, though the wordplay was pretty clear. Apparently it's a Scots term for a cloven hoof, and by extension, the Devil. The sort of thing I'd expect in a Mephisto (appropriately) rather than the daily puzzle, but as I say, the route to the answer was fairly unambiguous. |
| 6 | PAROLE - O.R.(=other ranks="men", as opposed to officers)rev. inside PALE, as in the enclosure beyond which one doesn't want to go. |
| 7 | HEFT - H{igh} E{xplosive}, F{inancial} T{imes}. |
| 8 | AS ONE MAN - {m}ASON{s}, (NAME)rev. |
| 12 | INGLEBOROUGH - (IBELONG)*, ROUGH(="coarse"); second-highest peak in the Yorkshire Dales. |
| 15 | BOAT RACE - double def., being "face" in Cockney rhyming slang, and the actual race from Putney to Mortlake involving Oxford (dark blue) and Cambridge (light blue). |
| 17 | ABSCISSA - reverse hidden in clASSICS BAccalaureate; this was one of those "rings a bell" clues, as I vaguely recalled the term from maths lessons many years ago. |
| 18 | AGREEING - REE in AGING; more posthumous parsing, as I had to look up the fact that the wading bird the ruff is also known as the ree. |
| 19 | ASUNDER - A{nswer}, then [RED("communist"), NUS("union")] rev. National Union of Students or Seamen, take your pick. |
| 21 | GI JOES - i.e. Privates in the US Army; [{restles}S, {com}E, {t}O, JIG]rev. |
| 24 | OBOE - nOtBrOkEn. |