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All entered except the first letter of pen-pen-ultimate down clue: Second pair.....

I have the theme, and the 5 specifications, but can't find the quotation anywhere. Like a previous writer, I can't see how it goes in a loop?

Dylan - draw a 3x3 rectangle and another 1 x 1 rectangle around the central square of the 3x3. That leaves you room to write a looping 8 letter quotation between the lines.

You just need to find 2 larger nested rectangles

Really enjoyed that puzzle. Thank you Filbert. It was elegant throughout and some wonderful clues. I’ll remember this one for a good while.

I agree, useby, about the quality of the clues, which has been undermentioned in preference to the smarts of the endgame. I don't have the puzzle in front of me right now, but I was tickled by the penult across clue and the 3rd of the 10-letter down clues. If I had the puzzle here, there'd be others and I'm sure other solvers would pick different clues. This puzzle, I suggest, succeeded on every level, beginning with the initially cold solve, moving on to the grid fill, which because of the word lengths was far less terrifying than I'd expected, on to the already justly praised endgame. A palpable hit!

Dylan - the quote is very thematic, if that helps.

Could I just give a shout out to the first wordplay only clue as being absolutely brilliantly thematic, much more so than modestly described in the preamble.

Merci, Jordan

As ever, I finish but with one ? Doh!

I have 9 of the extra words but 1 eludes me (despite having the other half of the pair). It is half of the first specification and I have the half that starts a later down clue. This means the other should appear in 1 of 2 clues but....

I'm baffled!

Lovely puzzle and thank you, Filbert. My favourite puzzles are the ones that teach me something new and that definitely applies here. There are however three things that I would like to clarify:

Does instruction (2) imply the application of quite a lot of Tippex or am I being too literal?
How does the parsing of "Second pair nets..." work?
And how does the parsing of "Faith releasing sons..." work?

All sorted and, as has been said, this is a bravura ensemble of ideas.

However, I did wonder what a certain political text is doing there - but perhaps it is an oblique reference to someone else, who was not a fan of the theme.