Usually by the reply’s to the blog. Not to say other folks-elsewhere- don’t attempt the FT, but compared to the Guardian and response to the FT puzzle seems somewhat slack in numbers…

Sorry, not a fan of clues with no wordplay (I’m looking at you 6D). They either need to check every letter or give two clues for the word so it checks itself. That’s why British quick crosswords bite the big one.

I tried desperately to work out a way to get 6D with an anagram or something, but it fit all the checks, so I decided it was right regardless. But if I wanted to do that, I’d skip doing cryptics altogether.

To address Bamberger’s questions, in no particular order.
3D – particularly can be used in the sense of unusually/peculiarly (although a touch archaic this days, I think).
20D – Lab. is our ‘party’. Otherwise known as Labour, to those of us who are not psephologist and do not own a Swingometer.
25A – I don’t doubt that there are (and have been) thousands of poets waxing lyrical in Italy down the years. But in crossword-land, “Italian poet” is one of those categories where the principal exponent (Dante Alighieri) is so pre-eminent (and, crucially, wordplay-friendly), as to have become synonymous. Other typical examples are ‘Cornish river’ (= Fal) or ‘Argentine leader’ (= Peron).

I had to look up SKEWBALD which I had never heard.

Bamberger, LAB is short for Labour Party. Also, yes there probably are a bunch of Italian poets but crossword setters rarely use obscure proper names. One can usually assume that it will be the name of someone pretty famous, and Dante is probably the most famous Italian poet and maybe the only one I can think of right now. And while the Inferno is a poem — actually it is just one part of a three-part poem called The Divine Comedy — it is an _epic_ poem, which means it is interminably long and can in fact fill a book!

Liked 22a ‘wound’ sounds like wound(injury)+wrapped(wound – up).

Cheers for blog.

Nice one Aardvark. Great stuff.