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This week's Prize by Paul was a real mixed bag for me, in that some of the clues were fairly simple but the last few, namely 12a, 25a and 20d took an absolute age to figure out.

FOI was 8a followed by the crossing 5d.

In terms of overall difficulty, I think a lot will depend on how quickly you solve the 20 letter "be patient" clue which I did manage to do fairly early on but, that said, I'm not 100% sure of my parsing.

If you do get stuck, there is at least one hidden in both the acrosses and downs.

I'm also not sure of the parsing of the last 2 letters in 16d and of the wordplay in 18a - in the latter I've tried adding abbreviations for "second" and "daughter" or just "daughter" back into my answer but it doesn't produce "senorita" so I'll have to think some more on these.

COD - I really liked 4d and 23d but I'm going to pick 6d mainly because, no matter how many times I see the device used, I nearly always miss it!

Thanks to Paul for a challenging and enjoyable Prize crossword.

Did you find this as difficult as me or was I just not on Paul's wavelength?

Stay safe:-)

16d - the first three letters and the last two together form a possible word for ‘in the style of a French artist’ - perhaps ‘sh’ would be more usual than the last letter.
18a - add a d to the first 5 letters and see what you get.

Oh, and 15, 20, 24, 22 - take a look at the three letters that surround the anagram fodder (two at the beginning, one at the end).

18a - that's brilliant, I completely overlooked that🤬

"be patient" - that's my parsing too but I was unsure because there's no instruction or hint even about that use of the outside 3 letters

16d - again, that was my parsing but I'm not happy that the final letter means the same as SH - I've been trying to think of other examples where it might apply but so far ... nada!

Many thanks Rogissimo:-)

Re ‘be patient’ - the indication is in the fourth word of the solution, not in the clue, if you see what I mean.

16d - I agree - it’s a bit naughty, and I’m willing to bet that chrise won’t like it 😉

That's it, the 4th word is the word is the instruction - thanks again Rogissimo:-)

So do five appearances of 8a constitute a theme. It seems a little half-hearted, but perhaps there are more examples hidden away.

By the way, I took the whole word, minus 'good,' to be 'in the style of (a five-letter) French artist' in 16d. Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by the first three and last two, rogissimo.

I'm struggling with this, so just popped onto this thread to see if anyone else is strugling and then see Brendan's comment that it was mainly easy - oh well! But I have got 12a.

I've been doing this crossword on line (just the plain old website not the app) and just realised that the numbering for 3d is wrong. It says 3,13 but looking at the pdf it should say 3, 13, 21across. So if anyone else if confused, I hope that helps. Also the grid in the online version has 13a with a solid bar part way along splitting it into 8,1. So I've been convinced that the clue was 3, 13 (6,8,1)

Note to self: it's a grauniad crossword!

minty

Thanks to Paul for this one.
I went to a concert tonight and started the puzzle very late after returning. Perhaps it was fatigue, but I found it extremely difficult.
But having finished, I have to say ithe puzzle was very clever and I enjoyed the challenge.

FOI 1d, LOI 8 (not a hard clue, but blind spot on my part).
COD has to be a tie between the two long linked clues.