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Darla, I think there is some British-ness in 11a. But I am not familiar with it but it rang a bell.

Yes 11 is a U.K. expression that means working for a living. I enjoyed this crossword. The SW corner held me up the most. I too assumed 7d ended with the later alphabet letter, meaning there is only one rhyming pair (11 and 20a), not two, as it then does not rhyme with 14d.

Regarding the puzzles app. It has a lot of content in addition to the newspaper'crosswords. If you like sudoku it's great. Killer sudoku is even better. Codeword is also fun.

As for 24A: the six letters in "head of infantry landed; at" are "breaching" a word meaning "front". Seems OK to me.

Darla - there is no ambiguity in 7d. Nobody ever says '_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _E' to mean the three-word definition. Everyone says (eg) '_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _Y, what you mean is.....'. It can only be the second spelling so it's actually quite a good clue.

Hi Simon,

7d - Your right that the answer with an E ending is very rarely used but my point is that the last 4 letters come from "very well" which could either be ???E or ???Y. That, coupled with the setter's use of 8d, which isn't just rarely used but rather a term I have never once heard in my entire life gives, IMHO, enough justification to consider the 7d ending ambiguous.

Hi Brendan,
re the last 4 letters of 17d. I think the test of a synonym is whether you can create a sentence where they are interchangeable. I can see that, in, say
"He was doing his job very well",
the Y ending could be substituted for "very well". I'm finding it difficult to construct one where the E ending would work.

^ should be 7d., of course ...

H Mattrom,

Yeah, you're probably right, I think I just got so irked by 8d I thought 'well, if he can do it, so can I', when I should have just let it go.

By the way, after confirming that 8d wasn't in either Chambers or the OED I decided to look further afield, no stone unturned and all that, and so checked Collins and, wouldn't you know, it's in there as 'British English - myopia'!

I don't know why these things bother me so much - maybe I need to get out more 😜

Re 7D: The Y ending has nothing to do with "very well". Rather, "very well" corresponds to the last four letters of the answer.