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An ideal puzzle: a familiar theme; imaginative, playful features (I liked the letter strings); well-constructed clues (except the obscure synonym in 32 down); little need to search the dictionary or internet; and a neat end-game. Good fun!

Due to an unfortunate spillage, part of 37d is obscured, can somebody please help me out? Thanks

37 Trunk with lid discarded
— not to the litter
(4, two words)

Nice one, TVM :)

Dylan, I can't give you a complete explanation of 28d and 42a because bits aren't quite clear to me either :)


But does this help:

42a - definition is last hyphened word. Japanese is a one letter abbreviation inside another abbreviation. Not quite sure how to pass the first 3 letters.

28d - definition is last word (no letter change because its one of those 8 clues. I think it might just be a string of leads (after removing a short string) but definitely leads to the last 3 words before the definition, which should help you narrow down the word to ....well, one possible answer or its alternative spelling.

42a when you've removed the jumbled string, look up what's left in Chambers.

28d first 3 letters are abbreviations (not leading letters) followed by 3 leading letters.

Thanks Simond9x,

I hadn't spotted that string in 28a! Doh! Clever.

I really enjoyed this one. My only criticism is the title might be a little generous. I guessed the theme at the outset before starting looking at the clues.
It made it a lot easier to identify the clues with extra letter strings.

Agree with everyone else. Very nice, lots of interesting elements, end game clever but fairly quick and unambiguous.

Only loose end for me is 22d. Does the word you get by excluding the 'm' mean reverse somehow?

Back to last week's now, about 3/4 of the way through that one ..

According to Chambers:
transitive verb
To pass across
To reverse