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Thanks to Everyman for an enjoyable puzzle with many excellent clues.
I didn't care much for last week's effort, but this was a pleasure.
Perhaps a new/unusual setter? Didn't see a rhyming pair, only one possible alliteration, no long "first letters" clue.
Maybe mid-range difficulty? Overall not super challenging, but several clues required significant thought.
FOI was 1; that and another long perimeter clue were write-ins, which helped. Last one in the grid was 4, but 3 was the last one parsed.
Difficult to select a COD because I liked so many. Will go the Rev. Spooner route with 8, by a nose over the poetic allusion of 6 and the clever misdirection of 3. I marked 12 other clues as worthy of COD consideration, which is a good sign! Purists might find fault with a couple of clues, which isn't unusual for Everyman.

Very much a write-in this week. Most solutions went in and parsed afterwards. 2D is strange, more appropriate for a quiz word than crossword surely if I have the only possible answer?

I questioned 2 at first, but it does parse as (5,1,1) with the 5 a nation, so not an outright quiz question. Agreed that it's strange.

I enjoyed this one thanks Everyman. Have been away doing sudokus for a while so this was a kind reentry back into cryptic crosswords. Lots of clues to make a start on.

16 and 22 (the latter a bit of a thinker for me) were my favourites with 14d a close 3rd. As for 8, I get the spoonerism but I don't understand the "skippers" reference. No need to answer this just yet as it is too early for hints but I will watch the thread later on if someone is kind enough to explain it.

Definitely a step up in quality with some clues, like 3d, requiring quite a bit of unpacking. I needed Google to work out what "skippers" was doing in 8d and I'm still not sure how 16a is parsed. As Geeker says, lots of COD contenders with 10a, 15a, 22a and 21d all worthy of a mention, but I'm going with the excellent 3d.

Brendan, good point on 16. I wrote in the answer and forgot to parse.
After some head-scratching: think of where the answer is located anatomically.
If I'd parsed it earlier, I'd have ranked it higher!

Oh wow! That is an outstanding clue - many thanks Geeker:-)

I too couldn’t parse 16 until you pointed that out geeker, that’s fab.

A quick solve this week but really enjoyable. COD 8d - one of the best spoonerisms I’ve ever encountered.

Enjoyed this week's. COD 20a. Some fun clues. If I've got 8d correct then that was also entertaining. And 16a is another gem. Thanks Everyman.

Very good. Rather the a rhyming pair I think the first three words of the two longest down clues are ‘contrastable’. I recall Everyman did something similar once before.
Thanks to Geeker for parsing 16 which had eluded me. 2d does work cryptically but it reads rather too like GK. Not heard of 25d but nothing else fits there, a case of grid crunch I would think, but perfectly fairly clued.
Favourite, as others have said, was 8d.

Is anyone else having problems with the Guardian app, mine has been continually freezing ever since I moved to iOS 15.1. Maybe there’s a fix on the way but it’s rather annoying and messed up my Codeword time this morning :-(