8d – I hadn’t considered the type of spider that crawls over the internet and thought the clue was simply a cryptic definition for a creature that designs webs – I’ve seen similar before elsewhere.

4a – Are you perhaps being oversensitive? Obviously different papers will have different attitudes to this sort of clue but the FT’s crossword ed seems to have had no problem with it, and I quite like it myself. For me, if there’s a fault it’s that it doesn’t make grammatical sense – it should be “Churchill’s are WC” but then that wouldn’t be much of a cryptic clue.

13a – “facts of life” in the plural tends to mean “the birds and the bees”, while “fact of life” singular is one of those unavoidable things you have to put up with, as in “taxes are a fact of life”. I don’t think the article is required here any more than it is with any other noun-phrase solution.

Overall, I thought this was an uncomplicated but well-formed puzzle.

I did have that word in mind but did not see the anno, e-pic. And, as you know, I don’t put a word in the grid unless I have the justification for it.