Alan Connor finds responsible bankers and mischievous superheroes in his pick of the week's best – and most comic – cryptic clues
The news in clues
Among the many Chelsea-related answers (EMBANKMENT, CLINTON, HARBOUR, STAMFORD BRIDGE, PENSIONERS, PHYSIC and of course the timely FLOWER SHOW), there was a note of hope – or perhaps desperation – from Gaff in Tuesday's FT in his clue …
13ac Central bankersmanage return to growth (4)
… for KNUR, one of those protuberances in a tree trunk, and an analysis in contrast to the knottiness identified by this paper's Larry Elliott:
Central banks may well be inflating the biggest financial bubble the world has ever seen, the popping of which would trigger a second global slump, but they are convinced they know what they are doing.
Also evoking current unpleasantness was Giovanni in Wednesday's Telegraph Toughie in an audacious, literate clue …
12ac/13ac/28ac/15d Dreadful horsemeat fraud news causes mad fear– it's a brief unreal experience for us! (2,3,4,5,2,6,3,4,2)
… for WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON, as in Prospero's …
… the great Globe it selfe,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolue,
And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded
Leaue not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe
As dreames are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleepe
… cheery take on the relative importance of us and the horses we inadvertently bake. Giovanni is better known to Guardian solvers as Pasquale and he is currently celebrating a half-century in the crosswording business.
Latter patter
Some slapstick imagery from Bonxie in Thursday's Guardian suggesting a mischievous mammal creating havoc at a wedding …
11d Wolverine comicallytrippedusherwithrope (9)
… when the answer was actually SUPERHERO. The word has a legacy that begins before the age of the comic book superhero: in 1899, 35 years before the emergence of Superman, the Daily Mail reported that a future French prime minister had used the word, or at least something that could be translated as such:
M Clémenceau suddenly burst out with, 'All the world knows that Colonel Picquart is a hero, but … if Colonel Picquart is a hero, Mathieu Dreyfus is a super-hero.'
During the first world war, the same word was sometimes used to describe soldiers until settling on the sense given by Collins: a comic-strip character with superhuman abilities or magical powers, wearing a distinctive costume, and fighting against evil.
Nowadays the term is usually seen near another, often accompanied with the qualifier DARK. Movies now demand that we see the frailty and conflicts of our superheroes, leaving them with a punctured lung in a dungeon contemplating oedipal issues while supervillains take over the city – which brings us to this week's challenge. Reader, how would you clue REBOOT?
Cluing competition
Thanks for your clues for SHUCKS.
I enjoyed jazbang's use of "underwear" to indicate CKs in "Junks turn in St Helena's underwear" and both of the pedlars in unclestaveley's "The heart of mass huckster shows shame" and JollySwagman's "I'm surprised at what's in this huckster's sheds".
The neater constructions included benmoreassynt2's "Inhales – inhales hydrogen and blow" and Shenguin's "Damn storm-troopers capture Finn" and among the more allusive clues, steveran's "Expression often voiced with awe" was specially smart.
The runners-up are a tad graphic: gleety's soundalike "What Connery does at the teat? Ugh!" and wellywearer2's euphemism-noting "What's used in America when a shit could be too powerful"; the winner is the inventive surface of phitonelly's "Hesitation over taking out hole in socks? Darn it!". Kudos to Phi – please leave this week's entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.
Clue of the week
A new device for me in Saturday's Times:
1ac Contribution that, on reflection, sounds of little value? (5)
Unlike the usual soundalike clue, here we had to imagine a word which, when spelled backwards, sounds like "tuppenny". Anonymous setter, thanks for the INPUT.