Saturday – Now that this puzzle has eventually appeared on the FT website here is an analysis.

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An interesting one this. I only solved one or two clues on my first pass and had no idea what the theme might be. As the grid started to fill up, I spotted that S was the only letter appearing in the right hand column, and eventually that G was the only letter appearing in the left hand column. This helped with filling the grid, but I still had no idea what the theme was! I eventually cottoned on to the Gilbert and Sullivan idea, by which time the thematic answers were pretty much all that was left. My G&S knowledge is unfortunately restricted to The Mikado (because we did it at school) and HMS Pinafore (from the Cape Fear episode of The Simpsons), so I needed Wikipedia’s help to polish it off.

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This was certainly a fair bit tougher than Bannsider’s other recent Saturday puzzle. I quite quickly moved from trying to solve this unaided to treating it much as I would a barred weekend crossword and leaning heavily on Chambers et al.

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An enjoyable puzzle today, with nothing too difficult apart from the reference in 11 across, I thought.

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Extra letters in the wordplay lead to part of a quotation and its author, from which the (eleven) unclued entries can be deduced. There are ten thematic examples, one of which corresponds to two unclued entries (so I presumed the other nine examples were to do with the remaining unclued entries).
 
This puzzle was quite slow to start (and slowish to continue): in quite a few of the answers I had only part of the wordplay so couldn’t figure out the extra letter; a number of words were new to me (e.g. RACA, FRIS, VESAK, EARNEST in the sense used here); and there was some deft use of ‘arms-length’ synonyms (e.g. force = waterfall = lin).

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