As usual in situations like this I fall back on checking the original hoping that the point causing comment is an editorial intervention (I don’t know why I do this, it never is). By the time a puzzle is published I’m usually several weeks further on, and it’s impossible to reconstruct my thought processes for every clue, and I now find ‘quantity’ as curious a choice as some of you do. ‘Item’ would have been far better, and all I can think is that unconsciously I wanted a trisyllable there. (I only suggest that because I have on occasion – not often – found myself editing a clue to improve its rhythm.)

Clowder was new to me – Oxford webpage says

‘The usual word that’s given as the collective term for a group of cats is clowder.’

I think usual is stretching it a bit.

I too got fickle at 5d – the ‘future barrister’ was very neat. Too many great clues to pick a favourite. Thanks Phi and Ali for the blog.

You’d expect this to be an exploitation of a double meaning on ‘quantity’, but I can’t seem to get a meaning for it as ‘code’, or ‘oath’ or anything like that. Perhaps it’s Collins 6, the ‘characteristic of a proposition’ etc, but in truth I am a-strugglin’.

7d – Glad everyone seems to have been as puzzled as me. I’m beginning to think it is just a CD – the modern version of the oath is effectively a list (of sentences beginning “I will…”) so it is in that sense a quantity, or rather a number, of similar things (analagous to the quantity of pills implied in the surface?). Also, clutching at straws a bit, I suppose everything is a quantity, unknown or otherwise.

A fine puzzle from Phi, which I completed reasonably easily but still needed to come here for some final explanations. I thought the reference to bunga bunga in 17ac was very contemporary – if only …

CLOWDER and BIREME were also new to me, but clearly signposted, and I also liked WAFER-THIN. I too am struggling to understand HIPPOCRATIC OATH, although it was one of my first half-dozen or so entries because of the crossing letters.