CRYPTIC CROSSWORD

ACROSS

1. Strategic placing of men – old type arrangement (10)

6. Piece of music played so softly includes a turn (4)

10. Having just had hot curry, passionate in one’s speaking! (4,2,4,5)

11. The mistral swirls within as they spread the bad news (9)

12. Middling sort of cover-up found on the subcontinent (5)

13. Sentimentally pretty end of lament one hears from a bird (5)

15. Ageism may give rise to such metaphors (6)

19. Heraldically, white is mixed with garnet (6)

20. Hefty blow, but in such a way it doesn’t finish politician (5)

23. One pass made at a certain point in orbit (5)

24. Find self in sad disarray if they bite one on the beach (4-5)

26. Doesn’t talk much but might count Mum in a vice for a change (15)

27. Culminating point reached by primate at ten (4)

28. Local jargon made a Vulcan err in translation (10)

DOWN

1. Bold, insolent and fed up? It ain’t necessarily so! (7)

2. For each five that are dead wrong it is extended throughout (8)

3. Narcotic ring found up the first motorway (5)

4. Runner’s spirit, and such nonsense (9)

5. Such as are wanted to send the East into disarray (5)

7. Capital support for the invalid taken in by wartime captive (6)

8. Fashionable list compiled with the retiring (7)

9. Following orders, order nuts initially in one’s intake (8)

14. Possibility of being a nuisance is remote (8)

16. Shun, one is told, such heed as is paid to it (9)

17. I’d turned copper with jail-break: that’s just like a judge (8)

18. The shoveller is alas put to flight (7)

21. Bacteriologist treated pus with rate of variation (7)

22. Eros loved her mind, perhaps (6)

24. Get one pickled and thus have the advantage (5)

25. Foreign currency is – and can be – mendicant (5)