i Cryptic Crossword 3711 by Tees

Difficulty rating (out of five): ⏳⏳⏳

Tees this Thursday with a… Thursday Independent reprint that some back in the day found to be quite tough. I made steady if not spectacular progress through the puzzle, with any difficulty coming not from the wordplay, which was always clear and fair, but a number of entries that were less than familiar. One or two I did check, the likes of BALDACHIN and the native American looking less than likely, but there they were, almost as if I should have trusted Tees all along. There was only the one where I struggled with the parsing – the barbarism at 6d, where I didn’t know the physicist, but the rest went in without much ado.

CoD? I’ll go with the cryptic definition at 12ac – “Participate in show trial? (8)”.

All the answers and parsing of the clues can be found in Fifteensquared’s blog from November 2018:

https://www.fifteensquared.net/2018/11/29/independent-10025-tees/