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Paul at his mischievous, devious best (or worst, if you don’t like that sort of thing). Took me ages to get a foothold, but then I was hooked.

Yes, thanks to Paul. He's in top form here, I found it strongly at the difficult end of the spectrum.

FOI 2. Got started only in dribs and drabs via the low-hanging fruit. Good progress for a while but stalled out on the last half-dozen or so clues. Last ones to fall were 11 and 1d, with 1d LOI.

Many enjoyable clues, I can't give a COD right now.

I think there's a theme of sorts, more typographical than semantic, which may not make sense but I fear spoilers at this point.

Curious about others' opinions. Paul is a long-time favo(u)rite of mine but rather polarizing with a significant number of non-fans.

How our experiences differ, geeker! 2 wasn’t my LOI, but it certainly wasn’t my first. For some reason I nearly always find myself gravitating to the bottom of the grid for a foothold in the trickier crosswords, and this was no exception. I never keep count, but looking back I think my FOI was 26.
I can’t begin to decide on a COD on this occasion, which is in itself a tribute to Paul.

Most of my early solutions were also in the bottom half. But the bottom half also contains what I found the two hardest clues. Guessed one (which required Google to confirm) based on crossers, and had to break out my NSOED to get the second word of the other.

For those who don't care for Paul, Buccaneer aka Picaroon is the FT setter tonight.

Definitely on the harder side with some rather tricky parsings here and there. For me it was the NW corner that held out the longest, though for no particular reason I can see now.

Crossing 23 and 25 in a corner like that would be considered unfair by some as there are only 3 crossers available for a 9 letter solution.

Thanks for the Buccaneer recommendation Geeker, I shall take a look.

i've a busy morning cooking for a curry party tonight, so i won't have time to do any more, i expect
not too disappointed as it's a paul - and i disliked the definition in my foi 16d (i did like the rest of the clue, though!)

Looks like a typical Paul slow burner to me. Slow progress so far. I feel solving the long 13,18,7 will be a key factor in this.

Am I the only one never to have heard of 8d?

I see a general theme of "doubles". Maybe it's more specific, but I often miss themes.

rocky, I thought 8 was a fairly common (though ancient and perhaps even archaic?) UK expression. 17 and 24 were the solutions unfamiliar to me. The homophone also may not be obvious for those outside the UK.

I got the long multi-word solutions fairly quickly, but still stalled out.