Colossus 226 Judge Sums Up

Intriguing and interesting
Our Baffler has perhaps some of the most intriguing clues of all our crosswords, but the answers are not always easy to find. Well done if you tracked down these ones.
MAIGRET was the answer to ‘Simenon detective’. Georges Simenon was a Belgian author who created Jules Maigret, a Parisian sleuth second only to Sherlock Holmes as the world’s best-loved detective. Simenon was a prolific writer with over 400 books published. He is considered perhaps the most widely published author of the 20th century. If you haven’t read any of his books, then maybe a trip to the local library will uncover a new world of reading for you.
WU HU, the answer to ‘Han dynasty foes’, equates to something like barbarian in European history. Wu Hu was a collective term for the nomadic non-Chinese tribes who invaded Northern China.
We had a query about our clue ‘Guitar music icon, Isaac … ALBENIZ’. While this Spanish composer and pianist wrote for piano, much of his music was transcribed for guitar and has become more famous as a part of classical guitar players’ repertoire.
We also received a call suggesting that our clue ‘Domestic servant’ was incorrect as the answer MENIAL is an adjective. No gremlin – our Collins and Oxford also list the word as a noun.
Over in the Stinker all was looking good. At 82ac LOUCHE was needed for ‘Sordidly seductive’. A couple of entries had LOSCHE which, according to some websites, is the French word that louche comes from, but it doesn’t appear in any of our dictionaries.
At 92ac ‘Cool & humid’ was DANK, not DAMP, which made 48dn incorrect as well. ‘Vineyard owner’ was VIGNERON not VIGNEROM.
179ac was PROLIX for ‘Garrulous’ and 135dn was EPISTAXIS for ‘nosebleed’ not EPISTASIS – X not S was needed to make these two words correct.
The ‘Study of flags’ sounds like quite a vexed subject! The origins of the word VEXILLOLOGY are in Latin but the word is not related to vex. A vexillum was the sort of flag used by Roman Legions and vexillology was originally coined to describe a branch of heraldry. Our Stinker clue 129dn needed VEXILLOLOGY, however we spotted a few wrong spellings here.
There was an interesting bit of trivia, if you didn’t already know it, at 196ac. A ‘Brood of pheasants’ is known as a NIDE. This comes from the Latin for ‘nest’.
PTAH, a strange spelling for English, was the ‘Chief Egyptian deity’ at 68dn. Ptah was the creator god and the patron of artisans. He is usually depicted holding the ankh, another word we like to slip in to crosswords from time to time. The ankh is the symbol for health and life and looks like a cross with a loop on the top.
At 210ac ‘Social climber’ was an ARRIVISTE not ARRAVISTE. This word, as you would expect, is related to ‘arrive’.
A couple of clues seem to have resulted in mix-ups or mental blanks. At 319ac ‘Reject’ was SPURN not SHURN (maybe you were thinking of SHUN) and at 10dn THRIFT not SHRIFT was the answer to ‘Prudent spending’. Shrift you would be familiar with from the phrase ‘make short shrift’ and means ‘to dispose of quickly and unsympathetically’. To shrive is to make penance and ‘short shrift’ was a short time for which a prisoner could be granted a confession.
English is always fascinating with its endless interesting historical references, most of which we hardly give a thought to – except perhaps when we are doing crosswords.