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S_pugh, I also lack the OED. Wiktionary has 29 as a narrow passage between precipitous rocks or banks, so I'm sure that agrees with mine, while it shows 23ac as a shortened form of a soft drink flavouring. If I'm right, that is!

I hope you are right S_pugh as that is what I have - I now only need 23d which is driving me up the wall!!

Sorry - I meant quisling in my previous post.

That sounds as though it matches mine perfectly Quisling, and as I've run a mass edit in XL to convert all my answers to entries I'm happy that they all work out. An excellent puzzle but not half as daunting as it might seem, glad my intuition paid off!

S Pugh - I can guess your route in which I only spotted with hindsight and is a pretty impressive spot mid-solve so congrats.

Nice touch by the setter though.

For info only! I access the OED online using my wife's library card number. Most Local Authorities sign up to it.

All done now - it would have removed a lot of angst if I had realised I had the coding for J from 2d. What seemed an impossible task was considerably easier than I first thought. I am at a loss as to how 9a proved to be the entry point for some people, I started, with an educated guess as to the meaning of the title, at 19d.

Many thanks to Lysander for an enjoyable puzzle. I had no idea where to begin, but tried something out from the top of the page, as it were, and then it all fell into place!

Many thanks Quisling - your post at 51 enabled me to work backwards to encode one of the answers and it all fell into place from there. I'm not sure I would ever have got started on the encoding otherwise. For me, the endgame was far too "Guess What I'm Thinking" to be enjoyable, though it was quite satisfying to fill in the entries once I got started (thanks to help on here). I'm glad others got more pleasure out of this than I did.

For what it’s worth, once I’d worked out which were the single vs double digit subs, I gave each single digit a one digit number, then filled the grid with numbers ( the 2 digits fall easily] and was left with a relatively simple substitution puzzle assisted by checking relative letter frequencies with big help from 9ac. I found this less confusing than using the initial grid answers.