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In today’s Guardian:

Turn up first part of encyclopaedia, perhaps — it's very small (4)

In today’s Times:

Letter from nine written in reverse (4)

I much prefer the second one - neater and niftier!

Agree, but the Guardian one was part of a theme so probably doesn’t stand alone quite so well

I did get the first one much more quickly as I had already done the Times puzzle.

Plus the theme as Jono mentioned.

Sorry, someone is going to have to explain the Times clue to me (I solved the Guardian one and smiled when I worked out the parsing!]

First nine letters of the alphabet.

Brian Greer who is ‘Brendan’ in the Guardian was the crossword editor at the Times at one point. And I believe, a “math prof” in the US now

Thanks MPRS. "From nine" seems a bit indirect. I haven't done a Times puzzle since I retired from teaching, though....

I went back and took another look at the Brendan puzzle and saw what a remarkable puzzle it was. I didn’t even realize at first just how many Greek letters he worked in. Across the top set of down clues alone there are tau, mu, and xi along with the obvious one. We math types love our Greek letters.