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All done but can’t parse 29 which I assume has an M in the unch.
Got held up slightly by entering 13d early which made it difficult to solve 31a. 13d can only be entered after making the switch as per the preamble.

Hi smithsax, Demo(crat).

Is one of the symbols a letter? Otherwise I am stuck!!

Yippee, PDM moment, and I feel stupid now!!!

The symbols are not letters. They represent objects and they are in adjacent cells. One has to transit over the other and a letter goes the other way. There is a link to one of the reasons for the original journey which you can google.

After googling some images I had become transfixed with a partial, rather than full transit - then I woke up.

Am I right thinking that the last letter of 18D needs to switch with a symbol ? Then that leaves non-words in 31 and 32 ?

That is what I have done.

Thanks for the reinforcement, Smithsax.
As an observation, not a criticism : I suppose that once you've used 9 lines of preamble to explain how a playfair square works, there isn't so much preamble available to explain that some final entries will be non-words.

I wanted to wait until today (26 August 2018) to mark the exact 250th anniversary of the start of the thematic journey.

Although I’m away from home, I’ve managed to do the puzzle without any reference books (I hope - will check later), helped by a strong hint from a book that was reviewed in today’s Saturday Review.