FACTFINDER’S CROSSWORD

ACROSS

1 John George __ (1860 - 1920), Edinburghborn cartographer (11)

9 A four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage in India (5)

10 Relating to the northern group of Celtic languages (8)

12 A hawk of the genus Circus (7)

13 V S __ (1932 - 2018), Trinidadian writer who won the Booker Prize in 1971 with In a Free State (7)

14 US state (35,385 sq miles; pop about 1.4 million), nicknamed the Pine Tree State (5) 15 The true oysters (9)

18 Battles between fighter planes at close quarters (3-6)

20 Holiday homes in rural France (5)

21 A public walkway, especially between rows

of poplars (7)

24 The aardvark of southern Africa (7)

25 A ritual suicide in feudal Japan (4-4)

26 A bailiff or steward (hist) (5)

27 The yellow vipers of tropical America (3-26)

DOWN

2 Extreme greed for wealth, etc (7)

3 An old British biplane used by the RAF as a training aircraft (5,4)

4 A giant hunter in Greek mythology (5) 5 A follower of a 19th century social reformer (1771 - 1858) (7)

6 A member of the heath genus (5) 7 Relating to a Greek mathematician from Syracuse (c 287 - 212 BC) (11)

8 The Norwegian parliament (8) 11 Formerly the epicentre of the newspaper industry in London (5,6)

16 Relating to a small Australian state (26,383 sq miles; pop about 550,000) (9)

17 A small wading bird of the plover family (8) 19 Large European island (32,595 sq miles; pop about 6.6 million) (7)

20 Woody __ (1912 - 67), American singersongwriter who wrote This Land is Your Land (7)

22 The love of God for man (5)

23 A kind of small gazelle (5)