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Once again I find myself in a familiar position, having solved all of the clues and filled the grid, but completely stuck on the end-game. I have managed to work out the message from the spare words and I think I know from this how to carry out its first part and I have filled the third, fourth and sixth circles. I have tried adding a 'Z' to the asterisked letters, but this did not help. Absolutely no idea where to go from here! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

0pt0
I was likewise pretty frustrated by the message. I'd say the interpretation of it is unobvious even having got it eventually. I originally thought it consisted of separate parts, but in fact it needs to be read as a whole. Backwards big hint: kramenoylnosahllechcae (that applies only to the uncircled squares)
My first break was looking for people with the Z name on wikipedia. There aren't many of them, and one should strike you as a likely candidate. Then look for links between a character associated with him and the one in the grey cells. Everything in the preamble is a pointer, the dates, the anagram of the white letters etc.

This was a complex preamble, and I think the description of the overlap was poor. But we've discussed that already, and to be fair I'm not sure how to word it better! I have punctuation marks in 3, 4, 6, one letter which completes the asterisk man, and two marks (both the same) which I artistically copied from an example I found with google's help. I took the message, figured out how to read it, and then obeyed the first three words. Then I obeyed words 4, 5, 6 and 7. Then I obeyed words 8 and 9. There were two ways to do the last bits, one gave gibberish YNOEJGO while the other gave me the start of a thematic title so I replaced the encircled letters that way as instructed, wrote the remainder of the title below, then realised what the dedicatee business was all about, googled for the 11/6 and asterisk man in the light of that, stuck it all into an envelope and went for a lie down.

mdmaylwin, 24 is not an anagram, though it took me a while to realise that -- it so very nearly is! A synonym for utter is written "to port", plus a last letter, to make the definition at the end.

Like mdmaylwin, I cannot see the anagrind in 8. Is this just a bit of loose clueing, or is there a way to parse it I haven't spotted?

I agree about the anagrind in 8. The answer is obvious but the parsing seems loose to me. Maybe I am missing something.
Incidentally I flagged the final entry format at #62. I am sure both will be marked correct.

mooncow, the anagrind in 8 is the very short word right before the definition, meaning “on the way to being drunk”. It crops up from time to time. Along with the colour in the following clue (Scottish), it seems almost anything can be stretched to be an anagrind.

Sorry, I meant to type “the colour in the preceding clue” …

Jamesm, thanks for trying to help me at # 112, but I am afraid to say that I am no further forward. I had already tried googling the Z name with various other words which I thought might be relevant (including the word in the grey cells and the phrase from 6/11), but nothing jumped out at me. It has been suggested in another post in this thread that the letters in the white cells of rows 5 and 6 are an anagram. I have tried to work out what this might be, but I have only come up so far with "metric testicles", which does not seem very likely!

When I Google the z name and 11/6 and wiki, the first wiki site is relevant

The anagram was referring to the anagram already provided in the preamble

Surprised by how much some seemed to like this. I thought it was a slog and a mess. Lots of fruitless googling. No connection between the two themes other than the one word. Nothing clever about the endgame. And I've got no idea what the significance of the punctuation marks is.

And a pretty mighty GWIT to understand the hidden message. And I'm not having 'on' as an anagrind.

Not for me.

Even knowing how the punctuation marks work, I'm very much in agreement with you, smellyharry - especially with regard to the superficial thematic connection (but we're very much a minority opinion it seems).