Sunday Times 4798 by David McLean

17:18. I felt I made very heavy weather of this. I solved about half of it very quickly indeed, but then slowed to a crawl. Broadly speaking I found the north-east a lot easier than the south-west, but in many cases I was making problems for myself (I had TITTILATE for quite a long time) and/or being very slow to twig things that seem simple in retrospect. GODIVA, for instance, was my last in and I kicked myself hard when the penny finally dropped.

So I wonder if it was just me, or if others found this a bit trickier than it now seems. From my point of view any difficulty involved certainly didn’t come from the use of obscurity. LEONIDAS isn’t the first king to come to my mind, but I’m sure he’s come up before, and everything else was perfectly familiar. And as we’ve come to expect from Harry the whole thing was very entertaining.

Definitions are underlined, anagrams indicated like (THIS)*, anagram indicators like this.

Across
1	There’s no place for mild bitter
	ACID - plACID.
4	Book with hot photo takes the biscuit
	BRANDY SNAP - B, RANDY, SNAP.
9	In the past, I got up out of habit
	GODIVA - CD.
10	King unhappy one Christmas after a turn
	LEONIDAS - reversal (after a turn) of SAD, I, NOEL. King of Sparta, killed at the battle of Thermopylae by the Persian army led by Xerxes, who also appears here from time to time.
11	Vulgar party game for swingers?
	BASEBALL - BASE (vulgar), BALL (party), then a cryptic definition.
13	Get a dry drop of Amarone at home
	ATTAIN - A, TT (teetotal, dry), Amarone, IN (home).
14	Replace heads of old left in African state
	CALIFORNIA - (Old, Left, In AFRICAN)*. This one took me ages to see. It seems simple in retrospect but perhaps it’s not completely obvious how the wordplay works. So much so in fact that I got it wrong. Thanks to anon below for correcting me.
16	Clueguide
	LEAD - DD. The first definition is the kind of LEAD a detective might get.
17	Correct turning point for reversing
	EDIT - reversal of TIDE. In this case a high or low one: the sort which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.
18	It’s a little odd and tickles a little
	TITILLATES - (IT’S A LITTLE)*.
20	Not just as brown mops are?
	UNFAIR - two definitions, one slightly cryptic. A ‘mop’ is hair, of course.
21	Fruit works with, say, grapefruit starter
	EGGPLANT - PLANT (works) preceded by EG, Grapefruit. The people who insist that an aubergine is a fruit no doubt adopt the same position on the tomato. Don’t eat their fruit salad. You should probably avoid their ratatouille too, come to think of it.
23	Man in silk changingforeign capital
	HELSINKI - HE, (IN SILK)*. Somewhere I will be going a lot less when I leave my job in a couple of weeks.
24	Brood on times I left to go to The East
	LITTER - reversal of RE (on), TT (times), I, L.
26	Writer’s stuff is unmoving on radio
	STATIONERY - sounds like ‘stationary’. Chestnut.
27	Perhaps a school in need of turning around
	NOTE - reversal of ETON. Cunning definition.

Down
2	My love wants company in the van
	COO - O (love) with CO (company) in front of it (in the van).
3	Ambition to succeed? It’ll be a long shot
	DRIVE - DD. The second definition wasn’t necessarily accurate when I played golf.
4	Swagger shown by upcoming lawyer with excellent case
	BRAVADO - BRAV(AD)O. The reversed (upcoming) lawyer is a DA.
5	Where sleepers might be found at every point
	ALL ALONG THE LINE - two definitions, one a mildly cryptic reference to railway sleepers.
6	Small scene in play is Iago’s first and last
	DIORAMA - D(IagO)RAMA.
7	Can I still castpiece of little substance?
	SCINTILLA - (CAN I STILL)*. The small piece is almost always evidence, but it is almost always absent.
8	Babe in a car collecting a newcoffee-maker
	ARABICA BEAN - (BABE IN A CAR, A)*. The wordplay suggests that strictly you have to insert the A into BABE IN A CAR and then make an anagram. Where you insert the A is up to you.
12	A group of dudes close to arrest for desertion
	ABANDONMENT - A, BAND, ON, MEN, arresT. You have to separate each element here to get ON from ‘of’. I don’t really understand how the two are equivalent though: Chambers gives ‘on’ as a definition of ‘of’ but I can’t think of a sentence where you can substitute one for the other. Can you?
15	Out of order train isn’t on its way
	IN TRANSIT - (TRAIN ISN’T)*.
18	Piece from editor on touristy city abroad
	TORONTO - contained in ‘editor on touristy’. Somewhere I will be going a lot more when I leave my job in a couple of weeks.
19	Large ship must give European a lift by law
	LEGALLY - L, GALLEY with the E moved up (given a lift) to the beginning.
22	Language seen in loo left by King and Earl
	LATIN - LATrINe.
25	Have seconds in new cafe by the front in Torquay
	EAT - second letters in ‘nEw cAfe’, Torquay