A very lucky spot meant that this unravelled quite quickly for me - once I had the theme, a number of otherwise fiddly obstacles fell all at once. But what an elegant result, and so much thematic...
I don't suppose you'd believe me if I said I'd had to break off to cook the supper, so I'll confess that with most issues resolved and the highlighting done I had two irritating letters still to enter...
I was lucky enough to start the grid fill the right way round, but in any case the correct way is clear once the fill is well under way. Even with the grid full I had to go back over my rather...
I really enjoyed this one. I was held up a bit in the north-east corner at stage one, got my coloured pens out to keep track of what had to be preserved at stage two, had a chuckle at the elegance of...
I thought this was a very nice idea, but I wish there had been more consistency. Perhaps it wasn't possible to find a fourth theme word that would fit -- it's not my area of expertise. Some nice...
I thought I was doing so well when I had A-Z identified using a nice logical process, and working carefully enough that I didn't have to backtrack at any point. It then took me just as long to fill in...
That was fun. I made ridiculously heavy weather of the top right-hand quadrant and the two clued entries with clashes, and I had to check a few entries where I was pretty sure of what they had to be...
We have loved every minute of this magical construction. pdm after pdm with a most satisfactory finish. Congratulations to Xanthippe for a superb compilation.
The theme leapt out at us when we had solved just a couple of clues, but this has not rendered this any less enjoyable. With a full grid, we still have to get the pencils out to draw the thematic...
Nice straightforward clues, so a fairly quick grid fill, with totally unambiguous instructions to follow for the endgame. I had come across the theme before, and I thought this was a very neat...
Whew!! Actually, the first Playfair was not too bad, as a code phrase that long tends to lead to a bunch of letters left over that, as long as one or two of them appear in the hints, help a lot. I...
Nice and straightforward. I felt we could have been left to work out for ourselves which entry was reversed, and I wasn't too keen on the cryptic clues to the second line, but it's always good to be...
I thought things were going well until I ground to a halt in the top right corner -- even having the theme identified didn't help me much. Finally got there, though. I hadn't come across the poem...
That was quite a workout! Unlike several recent Listeners where an early guess at the theme helped a lot with the gridfill, this time I could not tackle the endgame until I had worked my way through...
Very satisfying. Some very good clues with some neatly hidden misprints. I'd forgotten that quotation, and was delighted to be reminded of it. Early on I thought there was going to be an ambiguity,...
That was fun -- quite a quick solve, but I liked the idea. The one slight niggle I have is that the literal spling has not been 100% carried out -- unless I've made mistakes in at least two entries....
I'm not really surprised that no one has posted yet, as this was something of a toughie. I think that I have it all now (at least I have a grid that fulfills the requirements). At first I thought that...
