Prize crossword
Across
8 Greek-born historian and biographer from the second-century AD, who wrote about Alexander the Great’s campaigns (6)
9 Last Anglo-Saxon king, whose rule lasted just nine months (6,2)
11 Political union of Germany and Austria, achieved by Hitler’s annexation in 1938 (9)
12 Dutch town renowned for its pottery; birthplace of Jan Vermeer (5)
13 Pre-Columbian people of the Lesser Antilles and neighbouring South American coast (5)
15 Term denoting a direct descendant of the Jewish patriarch, Jacob (9)
17 Chinese soldier and statesman, head of the exiled nationalist government in Taiwan from 1949 (6,3-4)
22 The fifth-century Greek ‘father of history’, who wrote about the Greco-Persian wars (9)
24 An Islamic title (meaning ‘guided one’) used by some social revolutionaries, such as Muhammad Ahmad in 19th-century Sudan (5) 26 Game thought to be derived from the sixth-century Indian war game Chaturanga (5)
28 Name, meaning ‘heat’, used for the 11th month of the French republican calendar, adopted in 1793 (9)
30 Mythological Greek hero, a central figure in Homer’s Iliad (8)
31 Originally a term for people of African or European (mainly French or Spanish) descent born in the
West Indies, or parts of French or Spanish America (6)
Down
1 In 1503–4, Columbus and his crew were stranded for a year on this island (7)
2 Simon __, 19th-century Canadian fur trader and explorer, after whom a British Columbian river is named (6)
3 'nglish town known as ‘Aquae Sulis’ by the Romans (4)
4 Type of rifle, adopted by the German army in the late 19th century, whose bolt-action mechanism has been copied worldwide (6) 5 See 27 down
6 Australian city named after a princess of Saxe-Meiningen who was married to an English king (8)
7 The decade that, in the western world, saw the blossoming of the counterculture movement (7)
10 Pioneer of computer science, awarded an OBE for his work at Bletchley Park (6) 14 See 29 down
16 British venue of a famous horse race, first run officially in 1780 (5)
18 A castle built by Edward I dominates this town in west Wales (7)
19 __ House, one-time residence of the Duke of Wellington, known as ‘No 1, London’ (6) 20 Native American people, one of the ‘Five Civilised Tribes’ forcibly resettled under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (7)
21 Those belonging to Hitler, ‘discovered’ in the early 1980s and initially authenticated, were later revealed to be fake (7) 23 Historic custom whereby members of the laity contributed part of their income to the church (5)
25 English navigator, Henry __, who was never seen again after being cast adrift by mutineers in 1611 (6)
27/5 Ancient trade route linking China with the west, used by Marco Polo (4,4)
29/14 Professor of classics at Cambridge, whose TV series include 2012’s Meet the Romans... (4,5)