✔️ If it's of any interest to anyone, it turns out that the reason I was stuck on several clues in the top right corner is that I got fixated on a word for 4d which means an African, fitted all the crossing letters I had, and contains a spice girl, but is wrong. I've been solving crossword puzzles for long enough to know that even a word which seems so close to working may be wrong and it's necessary to be willing to look for other possibilities, but it's still so easy to get my brain glued to one idea. Eventually it dawned on me what 8a had to be, which led me to very easily see what 4d was (I had long ago got the correct parsing) and, with a little more thought, 5d. Now I've got it, I think 5d was a nice clue. As for 14d, never having heard of the star didn't help, but even allowing for that the parsing is so straightforward that I have no excuse for not getting it earlier. Anyway, done now.