So that comments may at times be put more into context, and to perhaps brighten up the site a bit, I have activated graphic emoticons (smileys).

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It seems another blogger has been prevented from posting for one reason or another so I’m afraid you will have to put up with me again.

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Good Phi puzzle as always, solving time 21 mins.

* = anagram < = reversed

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I enjoyed this puzzle overall, except that I thought there was an overload of ‘select nth letter’ type of wordplay. The clues are a little wordy but have entertaining surfaces, notably 8A, 27A, 6D.

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This one was mixed bag for me. I found some of it relatively tough for an Inquisitor. The tough parts were the down clues. With the wordplay providing two extra letters I found myself getting half of the answers from definition and checking letters only. In some cases this left big gaps in my understanding of the wordplay and some of the extra letters missing. Luckily the across clues were relatively easy and so there were plenty of checking letters to help with the downs. Once I cracked the quotation I was able to go back and re-examine the wordplay, even then there were still some tough ones. I found it interesting how much harder two extra letters was over just a single extra letter.

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Unlike the last EV I blogged, I made steady progress with this one. Having got ‘ignorance’ twice, but not the author, I might have finished sooner if I possessed an earlier edition of ODQ, in which the quotation was indexed, but fortunately it didn’t take too long to arrive at ‘Johnson’ and from there I was able to determine the quotation and complete the outstanding across clues.

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