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All nicely filled - some beautiful clues - and the word to be changed 99% identified ... but no progress, despite a fairly restricted choice of crossing letters. I think I am looking for an adjective, but it could just be a noun - the source could mean either. Plod on.

Cockie, it's a noun you're looking for, a noun to be replaced with the last two words of the quotation (so you'll have the number of letters). The middle of the quotation has a very good description of the entry you're looking to change, it's a clue in itself...

Hmm. A diligent search of all nouns of the correct length in BRB (thank goodness for the app) with the restricted crossings lead to very few which fit, of which all but one are clearly not right. But that one isn't all that good either, which (given the precision of the rest of the quote) seems unlikely. Without giving too much away the number of letters I have changed is the square root of the first digit of the square root of the puzzle number.

You should be changing every letter of the entry with the last 2 words of the quote. The grid entry is a pretty precise definition (given how things are defined in Chambers) of a 3-words chunk of the quote.

Thanks, Buddy. I had wondered if my 'middle of the quotation' was a little vague, I should have gone with something like your 'three words chunk'!

Ignore all that - the P has D'd.

Cockie, thanks - and phew!

PS Your square root stuff was totally meaningless to me, and I didn't even attempt to decipher it, sorry.

Another excellent puzzle with a fun gridfill and an unambiguous endgame. Many thanks Eclogue.

I haven’t looked at the IQ yet but if it is anything like as good as this and the current Listener it will have been a bumper weekend.

As always I'm bringing up the rear. Not for the first time I made things difficult for myself by looking for a synonym for the key words from the quote. That having been said I enjoyed the puzzle.