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18a - it is in Chambers with this exact definition.

Thanks, brendan.

Straight forward I thought. 7d appeared in a Paul puzzle last year. 18a was familiar to me for some reason, maybe old episodes of Porridge or Minder and the like.
14a I immediately thought of Everyman’s clue from earlier this year to which the answer was ‘no sweat’ (what the Duke of York claimed…).
I have to say I’m not a fan of subtractive anagrams where the subtraction is almost half the original fodder; and I put question marks next to ‘no thanks’ in 15d and ‘wanting’ in 19d as odd choices, but maybe I’m missing something.
Cheers all

Hi Jono.

15d - If you take a word for "pretentiousness" and subtract TA "no thanks" - you arrive at the answer.

Ah, of course, thanks Brendan, I knew I had to be missing something, I thought it was a straight dd

Agree this was a bit of a breeze, at least until the SE corner, where some general knowledge (and more than my grade 6 French) is suddenly necessary. Loved the PDM when finally parsing 27A, though (some time after writing in the answer). One quibble: does anyone refer to just one of the muscles in 16D? Seems a strange way to construct the clue given that the much more common plural form could have been used simply by omitting 'second'. Terrible surface in that one, too, so maybe it was a late amendment by the editor or some such.

Yes, quite easy, though I missed Aretha too. I agree with phil about the surface for 16d (what on earth does "Muscle vacuous" mean?), but, unlike jono (?), I loved 3d.

In 16d I'm not sure that "Muscle vacuous" is a thing? I thought that in this instance vacuous meant to empty out the letters of the word "dangerous", leaving just the first and last to appear in the solution. I am a newbie though!

Welcome ciderdrinker
Yes "Muscle vacuous" in the wordplay means "take the insides out". However the surface "meaning" is non-existent!

Hi, all. Enjoying today's but not quite finished. With 16D, the first two letters are an abbrev. for muscle. Then there's the usual single letter for second, then the two letters for vacuous (emptied out) "dangerous" after the 3 letter prisoner. I think that works