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Searching for surnames with no clue as to topic is daft imv.

I eventually found 2 golfers, 2 composers, a football manager, an archbishop, a poet and a variety of other things. Only one of which turned out to be relevant. Unless you were familiar with the key conversation and the real name of one of the participants, there were a hell of a lot of dead ends / frustration before you might stumble across the first right answer.

And then to have the connected red herring to waste yet more hours of pointless googling / research is just daft. Fair play if you spotted the key names early. Lots of people clearly didn't.

I eventually got there, but that long name was no help. Had to grid stare on and off all week until one of the munged names popped out at me. But you have to be close to my age for that to happen. Younger readers would not recognise it at all.

Simond9x, this is a characteristic of a GWIT mess like this endgame — some people will happily stumble on the right steps, while others will just be unlucky. That’s what makes them frustrating.

I didn’t manage too badly, as one of the uprights suggested the other and the quote (I *do* have ODQ), and that and the title nudged me to what the other statement might be, I figured out the long name (I have a pose-matched photo with him :-) ) and found the long cryptic. Took me a while to find the remaining two members of the trio. All seems a bit random. Not even a very clever construction to be impressed by. But I got there. But I can see how several lucky stumbles helped me more than knowledge and/or ingenuity, and that’s not how I like my puzzles. Rant over.

I have a couple of parsing queries if anyone is still listening to me :-)

19 “Diminishes my debut in tales of Spenser”, just the wordplay — I think I know the outside but not what goes in it.

21 Quiet in exquisite photographic setting. Def clear, but don’t see wordplay at all.

Would greatly appreciate a couple of delicate hinty-nudges just to put my mind at rest.

PS the actual crossword part of this one I quite enjoyed! One or two very nice clues. Just the endgame let it down I thought.

19 - my debut refers to the start of setter’s name

21 - less usual two letters for quiet in exquisite (as a noun)

Brilliant, thanks cd. I did think of that debut, but was looking for two letters as I hadn’t done the Spenser bit properly. And that’s a new sense of exquisite for me — note to self: when struggling with parsing a clue, *must look up every word in BRB* :-). Many thanks — all happy now