Double Definition

If it were from a standard synonym crossword, the solution of following clue

Newspaper offence (5)

might be LIBEL. However, this double definition clue is inspired by a cryptic crossword in the Sunday Times created by Robert Price, and the answer begins with the letter T. It might help solve it to know the name of a British broadsheet famous for its salmon pink newsprint.

PS I now realise that Robert Price's actual clue: Newpaper taking offence was better than my doctored version because the solution is a "taking offence".

Pick of The Week

In addition to Tim Morey's cryptic crossword puzzle in every issue, The Week magazine (UK version) sets its news-hounds fossicking through other journals' crosswords for their "Clue of the Week". Here are three nuggets of cruciverbalist gold they dug up recently.

I take sustenance after ten (6 letters, from The Times Jumbo)

As we know, each cryptic clue has both a definition and some cryptic word play, which together point to the answer. Moreover, the definition is always a string of words at the very beginning or at the very end of the clue; thus in the above clue the definition could be "I take", or "ten" or "after ten" and so on; the definition can even be the whole clue with the word-play embedded in it -- these are known as "&lit" clues. To solve the above clue, it helps to know, or consult, the periodic table, and to realise that when "ten" is written in digits, it can also be read as two letters.

The second clue is due to Kairos in The Independent.

Fun was had in bed cavorting as newlyweds? (7,3,4)

Look out for the anagram signifier.

And finally, a very lateral clue with some gallows humour devised by Imogen for The Guardian.

Death - by hanging? (8, first letter C)

Good Books Lately

The English (and subsequently British) East India Company was founded in 1600 to trade in East and Southeast Asia and India, and it was so ruthlessly successful that by1750 half of the World’s trade passed through its ledgers. Its army of over 200,000 soldiers, which outnumbered Britain’s army, was used to impose military and administrative rule over large parts of India. Its brutal, high-handed and insensitive behaviour to towards Indian cultural and religious traditions led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. A year later, realising that the East India Company had grown too big for its boots and become an embarrassment, the British Government brought in an Act of Parliament to transfer direct control to the Crown. This marked the start of the British Raj, which absorbed the Company’s armies and took over its governing and administrative powers (and continued to exercise them until Clement Attlee’s post-war Administration granted Indian independence in 1947). 

I am grateful to two reading groups in my South Warwickshire town for some outstanding books I have read this year. There was The Sealwoman’s Gift, which I praised in a February post below, and now our April read: The Siege of Krishnapur by J G Farrell. When the sepoys (Indian soldiers) stationed in the garrison at Captainganj are asked to bite the bullets for their new Enfield rifles, they suspect that the bullets are greased with a mixture of ox and pig fat, anathema to India’s great religions, and turn on their British officers. Those officers left alive run to the nearby town of Krishnapur, remotely situated on the vast North Indian plain.(Although the town is fictional, the story has roots in the notorious North Indian town Lucknow, which underwent a 6-month siege in 1857, as part of the Indian rebellion. The author acknowledges his debt to a large mass of diaries, letters and memoirs written by eyewitnesses in Lucknow, Cawnapore and elsewhere during the Mutiny, which spread to many parts of the country)

The few officers that escape with their lives join the British representatives of the Krishnapur Raj, who retreat to the Residency compound and dig themselves in for the long haul. They manage to hold their hurriedly-fortified enclave for four months against constant assaults from the sepoys, but as their supplies of food and ammunition dwindle and the rains wash away their improvised defensive mud wall, so their layers of ‘civilised’ conditioning, their social hierarchy and their body fat are slowly stripped away too.

This novel is beautifully written with great wit and intelligence; it is well paced and is a sensible length too. It has a rich cast of memorable characters, embodying so many clearly-recognisable human types; it abounds in dramatic action; It combines tragedy, comedy and farce without compromising its serious intent; It is a universal story, raising many issues that are relevant to the world we live in now. Above all, is a brilliant commentary on the human condition.

Vax Fax

There is a misconception that getting a Covid-19 vaccination stops you catching the disease. It does not. It is not designed to do so. What it does is prime your body's weapons to be ready to move on the virus quickly and cut it off at the pass. As soon as the virus invades, the antibodies, B-cells and T-cells in your alerted immune system will instantly leap into action and descend in force to neutralise it and render it harmless. It is given no chance to multiply inside your cells and wreak havoc around your body. Your symptoms, if any, will be mild and will soon disappear. But you have to 'catch' it first before your immune system can send it packing.

A vaccination has the following beneficial effects:

• It reduces the number of serious cases needing medical intervention
• It minimises the viral load in those infected and reduces transmission in the community
• It can be targeted at those most at risk

It has the same effect on the unvaccinated as catching the disease and recovering. Immunity confers protection against dangerous consequences of becoming infected but not from being initially and very mildly infected when exposed.

Slavery

The year is 1627, Shakespeare is but a decade in his grave and Charles 1 in the second year of his reign. It was an annus horribilis for the people of Iceland, then a Danish protectorate. In two raids that summer, slave traders in their corsairs from Algiers, led by two renegade Dutchmen, brutally attacked settlements along Iceland's southern coast, in particular in the Westman Islands, killing dozens, burning villages and eventually carrying off 400 Icelanders to be sold into slavery in the markets of Algiers, an audacious round-trip journey of 5,400 miles under sail; 400 human souls represented 1% of Iceland's sparse population at the time, and even today its population is only 364,000

Sally Magnusson is the author a wonderful novel, which brings vividly to life the surroundings and experiences of those captive slaves. The Sealwoman's Gift is imaginatively conceived, beautifully written and carefully researched.  She marries the bares bones of the historical record to a fully realised and thoroughly believable 17th century world. Her story spans the impoverished wind-swept landscape of dour Lutheran Iceland and the luxuriant cosmopolitan Islamic diaspora of Moors and Arabs in North Africa, and the narrative is colourfully embellished with many stories and sagas from both those cultures. She writes simply but with poetic intensity and in a few sentences can transport you almost physically into the sights, smells and sounds of her scenes and into the very presence of the men and women she so finely and sensitively observes.

The dramatic events of those times are seen through the eyes, thoughts and lived experiences of Åsta, a remarkable Icelandic woman at the centre of the story and a talented story-teller herself. This slice of history is vividly depicted from a woman’s point of view, one which is so often neglected in the telling of our past. There are many engrossing themes, especially the importance of story-telling, the meaning of love: How do you measure it? and loss: What price must you pay for losing your children forever, even losing the prospect of meeting them in heaven?

Hung out to dry?

 This nice clue from Robert Price appeared in The Sunday Times:

Jeans and shirt put outside to air (8).

All you need to solve it is a brand name for jeans and a 3-letter word for a type of shirt.

The same either way

 A week or so ago, the date was palindromic, provided one subscribes to the format DD/MM/YYYY that is. There will be another palindromic date in February next year, but then a long wait until the earlier 2030s for more. Will they go on forever? If humanity is still around at the end of the 10th millennium and still keeping track of the days in a similar fashion, it will depend on the new format. If it's DD/MM/YYYYY, then yes, they will continue to the same old irregular way.

By coincidence  this morning, I clicked on that seemingly endless source of unpredictable entertainment and bizarre novelty, Greg Ross's  Futility Closet website, and discovered some verbal palindromes that were new to me. Mathematicians Peter Hilton and Henry Whitehead, who had been codebreaking colleagues at Bletchley Park during WW2, got into a palindrome exchange in 1947. Whitehead began with STEP ON NO PETS, to which Hilton retaliated with SEX AT NOON TAXES and after a sleepless but very creative night improved upon with DOC, NOTE, I DISSENT. A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD. Not surprisingly that 51-letter sequence brought the exchange to an abrupt end. It certainly trumps the old one about the Panama man with his canal.

I met Peter Hilton briefly when visiting  the University of Binghamton in the 1990s. He wrote a seminal book on Topology with Shaun Wylie, another Bletchley alumnus, whose inspiring Cambridge lectures on Real Analysis (rigorous Calculus) I was privileged to attend in 1957. While at Binghamton Hilton wrote a charming book with Jean Pedersen connecting algebra to special kinds of paper folding; the title is A Mathematical Tapestry (CUP, 2010,  ISBN 0-521-12821-8).