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https://www.dropbox.com/s/j837m3xwl2t2et6/Listener4643.pdf?dl=0

Thanks tatters : )

Thanks, tatters.
I hope this one is a not-too-taxing birthday present for me.

Happy Birthday Jif! It's not too taxing once you twig the theme, though it's quite hard to tease out some of the wrong/extra/missing letters.

The good news, it's your birthday - many happy returns!

The bad news. It is quite taxing, and some of the clues are a tad unfair, with at least one offering up a choice of answers (and hinting letters). Most of the thematic items are of a distinct type, but strangely not quite all. Got there in the end but I found it somewhat unsatisfying.

I didn’t find anything unfair, though as so often I got the message from the theme so didn’t notice any ambiguities. I think I know which one you see as an outlier, though Chambers suggests it belongs to the group. Pity the modifications are a bit ungainly as grid entries, though.

Had to take a break to finish this, turned out I had confused my last thematic entry with two adjacent clues where the letter change seemed to be ambiguous. As it turned out, all three were much easier when I worked out which was which.
Decent struggle, much helped when the author and work emerged from the mist, after which identifying the affected letters got a lot easier.

Here's a general query that I've been meaning to ask for a while; apologies that it is not directly relevant to this post.

Each week the Listener preamble touts The Chambers Dictionary (2016) as the go-to reference work. I have a shedload of different versions of the BRB scattered around the house, but the most up-to-date one is the 9th edition (2003). This seems very old but for a while I've been using an app which is the 13th edition; it has a date of 2014. At some point I got hold of a pdf containing 500 entries missing when this edition was released. Then I received an update of this app with the missing 500 entries integrated into the software. This is dated 2018 and I'm assuming it is the 14th edition.

The question now: is "TCD (2016)" also known as the "14th edition" or am I still at a disadvantage?

TCD 2016 describes itself as Revised 13th Edition

Thanks, gem94. Sounds like I'm singing from the right hymn sheet!