My only (very minor) quibble would be the use of basically the same word – ‘gore/gory – in the wordplay of two clues (20ac and 5dn).

Thanks, Phi and B&J.

As it happened, I’d decided to use him as a theme and gridded the puzzle, only to hear about the release of the new book on a date a couple of weeks or so in advance of my original plan. So a bit of hasty promotion in the lists was called for.

I’m sure it’s implicit in your explanation of SCOTER, but of course it’s referring to cricket, where the SCORER would indeed record a ‘duck’ when a batsman is out for nought. ‘Didn’t trouble the scorers’ is cricket-speak for getting a duck, as I know from personal experience throughout my long and not very distinguished career.

And a welcome from me too to Ron.

We have now had time to look at Wikipedia. The name didn’t ring a bell at first but then we realised we’d seen the film based on his book – Awakenings and unsuccessfully tried to read “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’. There may be a further reference to him at 9d.

When we started blogging we decided on a style which we hoped would suit an aspiring crossword solver. We feel that the only way to learn is through doing and we were so pleased to find this site some years ago to help us with those devious clues which we solved without really understanding why!

We constantly spread the word amongst friends who say that they would like to know how to solve cryptics but don’t know where to start.

Hope to see more of your comments! If there are other lurkers out there please feel free to join in! We were lurkers for a long time before we took the plunge!

Keep it up guys!

As usual from, a great crossword.

At first I thought there was a film theme (Footloose, Awakenings), but it seems to be an Oliver Sacks theme – Migraine, Awakening(s), A Leg To Stand On, Uncle Tungsten (thanks to Wikipedia).

On the theme of Wikipedia, the list of languages available on the left meant that Euskara as Basque was familiar to me.

Thanks B&J and Phi.

22ac/8dn: To me, it is always undesirable if an answer crosses itself, although this may be forced on the setter by the requirements of grid construction. For this answer, we have to fill in 19 squares of the grid of which only 8 are checked by other answers, so on a strict interpretation we have 8/19 cross-checking – not as low as 2/5 but slightly lower than 3/7. Of course, the fact that a specific letter is repeated is some compensation, and in this case the enumeration is more than adequate extra help. I would be a lot less happy with an answer enumerated as (7, 13) in the same space. The clue itself is one of my favourite types, with idiomatic and literal meanings of the phrase, so overall the large positives of this clue hugely outweigh the tiny negative, and it is my favourite clue in the puzzle.

27ac: I read this as H = “Opening of Haydn’s” (analogous to “friend of Dorothy’s”).

15dn: It took me a long time to get the EU for “Continental grouping”. There is no good reason for this. Using the checked letters and the non-anagram parts leaves EUS-A-IAN. The K and the R then only go in one way, so I am completely happy with this way of cluing an obscure word. As I said in another place earlier this week, I think it is a positive here that the checking letters all come from straightforward clues.