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Welcome to the forum nansen!

Yes, we need all the help we can get!

Great to meet you, nelson!

I meant nansen, of course, but no need to retract that,
I don't think!

Sorry to say I was rather disappointed with this. I thought some of the clues were too easy and the theme and endgame were somewhat arbitrary, incoherent even. Maybe just me, but anyone else feel the same?

Thank you for the welcomes.

Prospect7, harsh, I feel! Each unclued entry is a name which could be any one of many (OK, in the case of the two-word one, merely several) people, but becomes a 26d only when prefixed by two initials, except that the fictional one requires four letters and after not before; all these letters between them use each of the letters from EtoN twice and only twice, and the extra letters from wordplay provide two further writers who actually were Old Etonians. So you may perhaps call it convoluted and Baroque (though not so much by recent Inquisitor standards, but arbitrary? Surely not, I found it really clever and beautifully neatly wrapped up! As for clues being too easy, perhaps you're just a lot better than me, or have more spare time! I welcome one I can crack reasonably soon after buying the paper!

Hi Nansen, thank you for your considered response. I should perhaps say in defence of my admittedly rather negative post that I was basing my judgement on over forty years' experience of solving these kind of puzzles, (and occasionally setting them). Welcome to the forum!

^^ Oh dear! "This kind" or"these kinds".

I'm with prospect re the easiness of some of the clues in this - they definitely didn't seem as difficult as many other Inquisitors.

Having been the first to send out an SOS on this one, I must confess in retrospect it was one of the most satisfying puzzles I've done recently --- really ingenious in its construction! Many sincere thanks to all those who helped out while it was looking quite formidable!