TLS 1131 by Broteas, June 24 2016 — Do Not Drop

1  - ANDRE BRETON - French writer’s name in 4 Brontë version  (5,6)

7  - OWL - Snowy I might be, and I’m in famous children’s literature  (3)

9  - BOOKPLATE - Where one who 4s can write as well  (9)

10 - VOTES - They made a late decision to stay or leave  (5)

11 - NOSING - Slow movement’s what a pibroch performer does  (6)

12 - FOUL BLOW - Dodgy punch producing diarrhoea for Spooner?  (4,4)

14 - GEORGIAN POETRY - Series starting in the cool of the evening with Joseph and Mary, ending with bitterness and vagrancy  (8,6)

17 - THE TERMINAL MAN - Victor Navorski in Michael Crichton’s version  (3,8,3)

21 - ACCIDENT - Unfortunate encounter in the cinema, between the servant and the go-between  (8)

23 - ROWENA - Ivanhoe’s lady in dispute with another woman  (6)

25 - TRENT - Detective seen in some Gainsborough pictures  (5)

26 - HALLOWEEN - After an expression of surprise, believe in a spooky event  (9)

27 - COS - A Greek location for a triangular relationship  (3)

28 - COMET HALLEY - Unusually arrives at a passage in Hoyle’s sci-fi work  (5,6)

Down

1  - ALBANY - The Duke of New York?  (6)

2  - DROP SCENE - The end of a drama, or how to make it come sooner  (4,5)

3  - ELPENOR - Write in role reversal for one fatally involved in a 2?  (7)

4  - READ - In village school, I write and you (we hope) —  (4)

5  - TREVOR NUNN - Shakespeare producer, not one for an audience after William the playwright  (6,4)

6  - NOVELLO - Look after book for specialist publishers  (7)

7  - OFTEL - I was once responsible for lines in soft elegies  (5)

8  - LESSWAYS - Bigamist of reduced means, having son  (8)

13 - BIRMINGHAM - “There were antiquities from Central Italy […]; bits of mummy from Egypt (and perhaps —)” (Little Dorrit)  (10)

15 - TRADEWELL - City madam’s family succeed in business  (9)

16 - ATLANTIC - “And the gilded car of day / His glowing axle doth allay / In the steep — stream” (Comus, Milton)  (8)

18 - EIDETIC - Clear and vivid quote, with end reversed  (7)

19 - LEONORA - Boy and girl in the first version of a boy/girl opera  (7)

20 - HANNAY - Spy a couple of knights in a place to find books  (6)

22 - CREWS - Many sailors, and what they do in The Odyssey, we hear  (5)

24 - PLOT - Land that’s often developed in fiction  (4)

ANDRE BRETON - the clue is a compound anagram of the 'read' from 4d and 'bronte'

VOTES - is there anything more than a cryptic definition with a Brexit theme?

GEORGIAN POETRY, series of anthologies published by Harold Monro and edited by Edward Marsh. New to me but guessable for what it was. I took English at a university where they burned this kind of thing and replaced it with shelves of pulp fiction, with pamphlets by Roland Barthes scattered artfully about. The collection is almost accidentally important, spanning as it does the Great War, the arrival of modernism, the end of La Belle Époque. Sampling the early, then the later poems it's hard not feel the passing of something. Strange that the anthology's beginning should have been so slight:

"The idea for an anthology began as a joke, when Marsh, Duncan Grant and George Mallory decided, one evening in 1912 to publish a parody of the many small poetry books that were appearing at the time." - Wikipedia

The clue refers to two poems which roughly bookmark the beginning of the series: In the Cool of The Evening by James Stephens, and Joseph and Mary by James Elroy Flecker. And two from the final volume: Bitterness by Victoria Sackville-West and Richard Hughes' Vagrancy:

When the slow year creeps hay-ward, and the skies / Are warming in the summer's mild surprise, / And the still breeze disturbs each leafy frond / Like hungry fishes dimpling in a pond, / It is a pleasant thing to dream at ease / On sun-warmed thyme, not far from beechen trees. ...

...But Sleep doth hold me, and I hear no sound. / In the far West the clouds are mustering, / Without hurry, noise, or blustering: / And soon as Body's nightly Sentinel / Himself doth nod, I open furtive eyes.... / With darkling hook the Farmer of the Skies / Goes reaping stars: they flicker, one by one, / Nodding a little; tumble,--and are gone.

ACCIDENT - an enigmatic clue, which refers to Harold Pinter's screenplay for the 1967 Accident. It came after Pinter's work on The Servant ('63) and The Go-Between ('70).

ELPENOR - Talking of accidents ... Odysseus' buddy Elpenor is one of history's oldest known entrants for the Darwin Awards, having met his end in a rather prosaic manner by falling off a roof (hence the excruciating reference to a drop scene — hang your head in shame, Broteas!)

Hilda LESSWAYS weds bigamously in Arnold Bennet's Clayhanger trilogy, proof that nothing good will come of a boarding house in Brighton.

TRADEWELL - the name of several characters in The City Madam, a 17th century play by Philip Massinger, revived by the RSC in 2011 at the Swan theatre. It's well worth a glance through the summary and the priceless list of characters (very Carry On) at the RSC's site: https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-city-madam
Probably the less said about Shave'em the whore the better.

HANNAY -  a couple of knights (n in chess notation) inside Hay. I went to a few things at the festival at Hay-on-Wye in its early days, though in truth what I remember best is dodging the sheep on the astonishing drive across the hills to Hay Bluff. In 2001 Bill Clinton memorably described the festival as "a Woodstock of the mind". Some would argue  that it's now more of a Glastonbury, as evidenced by the appearance of Bill Clinton. Not I. Not I.