The news in clues

Crosswords are not prominent in James Bond’s world.

Unlike John Le Carré’s cerebral spooks and their real-life counterparts, Fleming’s/Broccoli’s spies don’t tend to take time out from boozing and killing for a puzzle. In Licence Renewed, Bond listens to his targets planning their evil ...

‘But with radio signals of that strength – covering Europe and the United States – they’ll pinpoint you faster than you can do your Times crossword, which is fast.’
‘I told you, Franco. Let me worry.’

... but this is from John Gardner’s official revival of the novels, published in 1981. The only crosswords mentioned by Fleming that I know of are in The Spy Who Loved Me ...

I made tea for the staff, attended the funerals and got the lists of the mourners right, wrote spiky paragraphs for the gossip page, ran the competition column, and even checked the clues of the crossword before it went into type.

... where the narrator Vivienne Michel describes her newspaper job while the reader wonders whether Bond will ever show up.

The froideur is not, though, mutual. Bond’s boss, Vice Admiral Sir Miles Messervy, has long provided setters with a way of indicating the letter M which allows for a spot of espionage in a clue’s surface reading. Here’s Beam in a recent Telegraph Toughie ...

12ac Spy about engineers Bond’s boss to finish contract (9)
[synonym for ‘Spy’ around abbreviation for Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers, with abbrev. for ‘Bond’s boss’ moved to the end]
[AGENT around REME, with M moved to the end]
[AGENT around REEM]

... clueing AGREEMENT. And with the release of the 24th Eon Bond movie, there’s been more. Here’s another Telegraph Toughie, this time Kcit’s ...

5d Like 007’s work to the destruction of SPECTRE (3-6)
[TO + anagram of SPECTRE]

... with a deftly apposite clue for TOP-SECRET. The same criminal syndicate appeared in an Independent tribute puzzle by Scorpion (look away now if you wish to solve it) ...

22ac One avoids receipts distributed for new film (7)
[anagram of ‘receipts’ without I (‘one’)]
[anagram of RECEPTS]

... which offers, when solved, a very glamorous grid.

Latter patter

Arachne (click here to Meet the Setter) suggested a brass-monkey scenario in the Guardian:

15d Manspreading, perhaps, blighting men’s igloo? (9)
[anagram of MENSIGLOO]

And if you’re not familiar with the NEOLOGISM that begins the clue, here’s a primer:

Just as MANSPREADING (Macquarie’s Aussie Word of 2014) identifies the practice of moving one’s legs “into a sort of V-shaped slouch, effectively occupying two, sometimes even three, seats” on public transport as one that is primarily carried out by males, so have other anti-social activities been gendered.

Aggressive walking can now be referred to as MANSLAMMING, while in speech, there’s MANTERRUPTING (or BROPROPRIATION). In this paper’s Mind Your Language series, Liz Cookman feels while these neologisms describe real behaviour, and are at first fun to say, they’re not ultimately helpful:

They serve to polarise people rather then unite us against gender-based social discrepancies and invite absolutism.

“[B]efore we go smooshing any more man-words together,” she concludes, “it might be worth remembering that a prat is a prat, whatever their gender.” The MAN- prefix seems to have started with a word which is the subject of our next challenge.

In 2003, the non-fiction writer Rebecca Solnit went to a party in Aspen, where “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money” pompously described a book to her, a book that he had not read, but one that she happened to have written. Solnit described the experience as one where ...

... forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that’s eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.

And once a phenomenon starkly identifies itself, it tends to get a name. So, reader: how would you clue MANSPLAIN?

Clueing competition

Thanks for your clues for A MONTH OF SUNDAYS. I hadn’t anticipated quite how well the phrase lent itself to plausible anagrams, such as HipsterPriest’s “Famous, shy and not mad, for a while at least” and robinjohnson’s “Of youths and man’s bewildered age”.

Also anagrammatical were steveran’s “amounts of shandy drunk in mega session” and alberyalbery’s suggestive “Playing with manhood stays fun for a long time”. And my favourite of the sweeter clues was yungylek’s decidedly non-puddingy “May perhaps speak about ice creams for far too long”.

The runners-up are Middlebro’s “Many thousands of dire days and days” and jonemm’s “Famous Tony: hands cuffed for a long time”, the latter of which was a kind of sequel to JollySwagman’s topical “After which Chilcot might report: Tony’s a sham – found out”.

Kudos to Swagman; please leave this fortnight’s entries and your pick of the broadsheet cryptics below.

Clue of the Fortnight

As some economic editors affix a “post-” prefix to it, and others predict its next crisis, this Times clue ...

12ac System that’s first-rate is beginning to malfunction (10)
[synonym for ‘first-rate’ + ‘is’ + first letter of ‘malfunction’]
[CAPITAL + IS + M]

... for CAPITALISM makes you wonder what further malfunctions might look like. Brace yourselves.