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Nice mixture of clues with varying difficulty. LOI 7D! Sometimes the obvious isn't a misdirection.

Liked 27a and 9d too. Not sure about the veracity of 13a.

21d - Unusual powerful chesspiece, itself taking its own knight (5)

I have the answer and can see how "knight" was removed from the "powerful chesspiece" (sic), but where is the instruction to replace it with the final letter?

Brendan, I don't like that clue (12d), but after some thought "itself taking its own knight" can be interpreted as a letter substitution, where "itself" is a non-chess 1-letter abbrev for the base word.

edit "21d"

I suspect the leaking it’s own” refers to the generic letter for Royal ruler - the letter after the name letter in the usual abbreviation. I do not like this clue.

Aaargh. “taking its own” - dyslexic fingers at work.

Geeker and Mystogre, I came to the same conclusion. Not wild about the clue either, but I've seen sneakier.

I thought that was a good level of Everyman. Confused by 21d too as discussed by others. My only other issue was with 16d "National Trust supported by Everyman: donated, tipped, droned on (9)". As it seems to start with "INT", isn't the National Trust supporting Everyman (as it's a down answer) rather than the other way round?

Re 21d: I think that's a couple of times in the last few weeks that Everyman has utilised the single letter abbreviation for Queen, having always used the more common two letters previously. Something to look out for in future?
Good overall standard this week I thought, with 25a the standout. Brilliant clue.

One quibble - how on earth is 7d a five-letter word!? 2, 3 or even 1-1, 3 would be more accurate.