I enjoyed this one a lot – at least once I’d ditched Ben for Enid in Benidorm… There were 221 correct entries, according to the crossword editor – a bit lower than normal, but as he says New Year may have had something to do with that. I thought it was harder than some recent Geniuses (e.g. Paul’s Okra Winfrey/Michae Wiener one) but about right for the slot.

So far as the level of difficulty is concerned, I think it fair to say that this has gradually increased over the nearly nine years that the Guardian has been running this series. Some of the early ones were no more difficult than normal daily cryptics (easier, in fact) but more recently the bar has been set a little higher. If I hadn’t had to blog this puzzle, I don’t know whether I would have persevered, as I certainly found it challenging.

(Gordon,
I’m sorry to hear you had such difficulty with it. I wonder why… It wasn’t supposed to be any harder than usual!)

Here is my take on the queries raised so far:

The intended parsing of VERANDAH is as nusquam states:
Royal (=ER) museum (=V AND A) first in having (=H) outside (=indicates position of VANDAH relative to ER) gallery (definition).
The construction ‘X Y outside’ implying ‘X with Y outside’ is a little stilted, I think, but not unreasonable (well, not by Guardian standards, in any case…). It’s certainly widely used, although perhaps not entirely satisfactory.

I agree that ‘rant’ is rather loose for ‘speech’. Looking at it again now, I am surprised it didn’t get an editorial tweak before publication since it could easily have been made more exact without any radical surgery.

The def. for APATHY, though, seems OK to me because the word ‘having’ functions as a gerund.

Like Bridgesong I remain a bit puzzled by the ER in Verandah, and also 19 doesn’t seem quite right: “having no zip” reads like an adjective, ie apathetic not apathy

If I had a hat, I would take it off to you. I am very impressed that you finished this, and also nusquam by the sound of it. I have completed every Genius in the past 8 months or so since I started doing these, with the exception of Auracaria’s ‘Printers Devilry’ which I gave up on part way through because it was irritating me. This is the first puzzle I tried to complete, and failed to do so, even though I continued with it because as you say the surface readings are so nice. Despite me getting 11A as my first clue, which was the theme of course, I could not get more than a dozen clues all month. Either I’m getting senile very early, or for some reason I just was not on Lavatch’s wavelength.

I did though do Verandah and parsed it as Royal Museum = VANDA; First in = ER inserted, as First referred to the first word ‘Royal’ and that was ER. I then had ‘H’ simply as a shortened form of ‘having’ etc.

Well done both of you.

At 16d, yes of course ER is a royal: that wasn’t my objection. I can’t work out how ER in V AND A can be clued as “Royal museum first in having”.

In 16dn, isn’t ER ‘Elizabeth Regina’ a royal?