The NI Crossword
No. 36 by Axe

CRYPTIC

Across
9 Viking calumny yours truly first reported (9)
10 Where in France a Rolls Royce gets a first service... (5)
11 ...and where New York finally gets petroleum company (7)
12 Folk song about the country (7)
13 Djibouti in the old days way off course along with Issas (5)
14 Place somewhere in Kent girl’s accent (9)
16 Dissenters a real problem for Pacific inhabitants (6,9)
19 Newspapers seem all at sea about 23’s wife and mother, for example (9)
21 Last Chinese 23’s family got at, unceremoniously thrown out of Chittagong (5)
22 US summit is wetter (7)
23 Quiet concerto following Beethoven’s Fifth? (7)
24 I got into headgear I needed for the country (5)
25 Disappointing Carmen aria doesn’t have right character for this part of the world (9)

Down
1 Leasing she arranged for some Sri Lankans (10)
2 Cats from 8 (8)
3 These people note ten children outside (6)
4 A feature of aerated dynamics is a whirlpool (4)
5 Animals are fleet with no tail, so ill otherwise (10)
6 Italian citizen’s mean and falsifies names... (8)
7 ...to hire within this town (6)
8 A silicon-aluminium primal land mass (4)
14 Sea-spout is unspectacular (10)
15 Old Berliner puts Garmisch first in holiday run (4,6)
17 Mistakenly cite emir as anti-social (8)
18 Flag-waving concerning an African (8)
20 Pine needle found about Cambodian mining centre (6)
21 Old Church choose all-round leader ((6)
22 Rhine headwaters’ upper reaches initially reverse this water-flow (4)
23 The perfect garden? (4)

QUICK

Across
9 Islander of Nordic heritage (9)
10 Town of northern France and a kind of tapestry fabric named after it (5)
11 Former French province, now part of the region of Aquitaine (7)
12 Country of the Caucasus, once a constituent republic of the Soviet Union (7)
13 The French territory of ------- and Issas: before the independent Djibouti in 1977 (5)
14 County town of Kent, England (9)
16 Inhabitants of Polynesian Rapa Nui, administered by Chile since 1888 (6,9)
19 Victoria and Eugenie, for example (9)
21 The last Manchu dynasty in the Wade-Giles transliteration, overthrown in 1912 (5)
22 The 26th prince of the House of Grimaldi (1950-)
23 Variety of moth and penguin (7)
24 The world’s first free black republic (1804)
25 Characteristic of a continent, or more accurately here, a country (9)

Down
1 Majority of the population of Sri Lanka (10)
2 Citizens of an ancient empire of western Asia (8)
3 Members of a tribe of North Germans, originally to be found around the Elbe estuary (6)
4 Current which runs back against the 14 (5)
5 Edentates of South America, protected by bony plates (10)
6 Italian hard cheese (8)
7 Italian name for site of ecumenical church councils 1545-1563, defining the Counter-Reformation (6)
8 The biggest continent in both area and population (4)
14 Middle-of-the-road, average (10)
15 Iron Curtain country citizen until 1990 (4,6)
17 Describing a (religious) recluse (8)
18 Inhabitant of Africa, independent in 1993 (8)
20 Major source of rubies and sapphires in western Cambodia, on the Thai border near Battambang (6)
21 Egyptian Church founded by St Mark, but isolated from the rest of Christendom in 451 (6)
22 Industrial valley of western Germany (4)
23 Biblical paradise (4)

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