Enigmatic Variations 842 Genius by Flashy-hat

I’d not come across Flashy-hat before in any of the usual outlets so I wasn’t sure whether to expect heavy meal to keep me eating over the holiday or a light starter before moving on to other potential main courses. In the end it was the latter. It was a fairly light theme with relatively easy, but fair, clues. I guess this was a thematic of the old-school, it’d probably not find a place in today’s Listener but the EV (and the Inquisitor) series can provide such puzzles as a way in for new solvers and setters alike.

In this puzzle a perimeter quotation provided the clue as to how 15 entries had to be modified. In solving it was the modifications that came first and hinted at the sort of quotation I would have to look for. Having the answers enumerated rather than the lights helped since it was obvious from the off what answers needed to be changed. There were fifteen clues which had answers that were three letters too long for their lights. There was a sixteenth clue leading to an answer that was letters too long. This slight thorn in my initial scan turned out to be a mistake in the enumeration (in the online PDF at least) rather than an unforeseen twist in the theme.

After solving a few clues it became clear that the modified entries simply needed the word ONE removed. I was a little disappointed that the resulting entries weren’t also real words. Not that they needed to be but with such a gentle theme it would have made the final grid a little more satisfactory. After a few more answers I looked in ODQ and found the quotation and author. Filling those in meant completing the grid very quickly, perhaps I should have held back!

The quotation, “[…] genius on the contrary, overlooks [and neglects] what is individual.” It was from a work by Schopenhauer, a nineteenth century philosopher who developed an idea of genius as one who transcends will. Oddly, despite Schopenhauer’s extensive writings on the subject there is just this one quotation in ODQ6.

(XYZ)* anagram
X[Y]Z insertion
X[y]Z deletion
X.Y.Z. initials
X…Z extremes
vwXYZab hidden word