14dn: The parsing above is clearly far better than the one I had. I took “Story” in the sense of biography to give me LIFE, leaving ESTYL to account for. “Liberal” gives the L, and I got ESTY as ZESTY (spirited) losing its initial letter (“one abandonding”). The reason I am bothering to mention this is that I thought at one time that we might have an interesting variation on the idea of a pangram, where there would be no Z in the grid, but every letter of the alphabet was used in the wordplay, in some cases as an excluded letter. Has anyone ever seen that idea used in practice?

A small grumble about 12ac: I cannot account for the words “with appearance of” in the clue. As always, I will be delighted if someone can provide a good justification for these words beyond simply saying that they improve the surface reading, which they undoubtedly do.

Your assumption is right. But “definition by example” is normally used to describe cases where, for example, “marmalade” indicates “preserve”, not the other way round. As you say, for a definition by example there should be an indication that it’s only an example – “Marmalade, say”, “Marmalade?” etc.

People sometimes confuse the two cases and complain when a category is used to clue one of its members, calling it “definition by example”, but this is a mistake. You can’t object to “actor” on its own indicating “Pacino” or “tree” indcating “oak”, obviously. If you look at today’s puzzle all the answers that are nouns have definitions of this type: 1,8,9,12,15,17,19,26,28 and so on.

The blog has now been amended.

BTW the full clue for 22ac ends “… old African country.” Surprising (or maybe not) how many African countries have changed their names, but once gulf=abyss emerged from the subconscious it was a write-in.

26ac was interesting. I guessed ‘preserve’ as a noun to be the definition and thought the answer might be MARMALADE without being able to see why. But I tentatively wrote it in, whereupon the wordplay immediately became obvious.

Which raises an interesting, though no doubt trivial, point about definitions by example. ‘Preserve’ is used here to clue ‘marmalade’ as an example of a preserve. But in another situation one might use ‘marmalade’, perhaps with a ? or ‘say’, to clue ‘preserve’. Would using (a) the part to clue the whole and (b) the whole to clue the part both be instances of definition by example?

Thanks to Phi for the puzzle; thanks for the blog – and welcome back – to B&J.