Poat is a setter whose puzzles I look forward to with eagerness and dread! Anyone who remembers his Rules of Construction from August 2009 will probably agree with me on that.

So in Cruciverbalism we had a relatively small grid (10×8) and an even more relatively small set of clues (10 across and 12 down, the dividing line being between the second 9 letter word and the first 7 letter one). An extra word in each clue identified a letter to be omitted before entry in the grid, using its position in the clue as the position of that letter, which was the same as either its first or last letter of the extra word; a lot of help being given here … there must be trouble ahead! Actually, this method of clueing an extra letter rang a bell, but I’ve no idea where it may have been used.

Apart from the first and last across entries, which were 9 letters, the others were all 4 or 5 letters, and didn’t seem enough to fill up the six rows not occupied by the long entries. The same could be said for the downs where 12 entries had to fill ten columns. In a normal grid, this would mean loads of unchecked letters, but Listeners don’t normally work like that.

So, the first across clue, Has length of mirror cracked? Appalling show (two words) seemed to be an anagram of L OF MIRROR plus an extra letter. I must confess that the pretty specific help given by the extra word took a few minutes to sink in; yes, I was looking for H plus an anagram of LOFMIRROR or S plus an anagram of LOFMIRROR since Has was the first word in the clue. I was just about to move onto the second across clue when I saw FILM and then of course HORROR to give ORROR FILM as the entry. I couldn’t believe that all the clues were going to be this easy. And of course they weren’t!

The great thing about Bradford’s is that, under a particular heading, it doesn’t just give synonyms, but also gives words that are at a bit of a tangent from the headword. The second across clue, A Bacchic cry set Hythe resort aback (4) had me find Bacchanalian and this led to UPSEE or UPSEY. Counting each word in the clue for a letter matching its equivalent in one of these words meant that it had to be UPSEE with Hythe telling me that the final E had to be dropped. The trouble was that I couldn’t get the wordplay to fit. I pencilled it in the second row, but very lightly. (Of course it turned out to be that other cry, EVOHE!)

Following on from this hiccup, some answers came quickly, such as BREAS[T]DEEP and LYA[S]E, others quite slowly. I assumed that Eliza’s racecourse would be something like ‘ereford, ‘untingdon or ‘aydock, rather than a reference to her being taken to Ascot; I couldn’t get LEM out of my head for lunar module (it was [R]OVER); and No mobile giant, falling back asleep (5) refused to let me see that No was the definition of AIKONA even though I’d half suspected that NOKIA was in there backwards. And who would have thought that there was a word HEN[N]Y?! It’s a bit like What’s brown and sticky?!

Meanwhile, the help provided by the dropped letters was taking shape. I should have got it sooner, but when I could see HE.RYV, a Shakespearean reference seemed likely, and it didn’t take long to fill in some missing letters to give Act Three Scene One. This could only be one thing, and I had CRY in the first three squares of row 4. So at last in this year of Swiss flags, French presidents and Scottish underground maps, here we had CRY ‘GOD FOR HARRY! ENGLAND AND S[AIN]T GEORGE’. I managed to retrieve my much depleted red pencil, given the amount of shading required for the Swiss flag, and set to work to give the English flag running up and down, and backwards and forwards in rows 4 and 5 and columns 5 and 6.

Great stuff from Poat, and so obvious really since the puzzle was published on 23rd April, which is also Shakespeare’s birthday!
 

This is Tiburon’s sixth Listener; his last was 4086 Back Gate, and was based on the discovery of the structure of DNA by Wilkins, Watson, Franklin and Crick. Most enjoyable it was too. Having had an easyish one from Augeas, a real toughie from Ten-Four and a straighforward one from Llig in the previous three weeks, I detected a trend, and was expecting this puzzle to be on the difficult side. Certainly Back Gate wasn’t a doddle!

It turned out that my prognostication was pretty accurate. The misprints in over half the clues were, for the most part well camouflaged. The remaining clues had to be entered thematically, based on a quotation differing from another by only one letter. Hands up those who sussed it out from this alone?! It seemed from early solving that the first letter of answers to these non-misprint clues were to be entered in place. It took me a bit longer to realise that the last letters were similarly entered.

I considered myself fairly lucky that after about two hours I noticed that the misprints in the second half of the down clues spelt out A…N.DA..NEND. “… and an end” could only refer to the Philip Larkin quotation about the formula for a novel — “A beginning, a muddle and an end”. This was a corruption of Aristotle’s comment about a whole being that which has “a beginning, a middle, and an end”. The central letters of each thematic word were therefore simple jumbles, presumably in any order as dictated by the down entries. There were ambiguities ahead, but they were to be resolved by both of the authors … interesting!

It was easy to see that NOVEL was in unchecked letters in the bottom left quadrant, and symmetrically opposite was WHOLE. A short while later and I could resolve 43ac C{RANKIL}Y which had three unchecked letters and could therefore be entered several different ways. Except that RANKIL is a jumble of LARKIN, and so was entered CLARKINY. At this stage, I had yet to solve 1ac, Macedonian battles not being my forte. Once I got PHILIPPI, however, I could see PHILIP trying to get out of the central letters and so it became PPHILIPI. Plus I had already identified a place for ARISTOTLE running down the main NW-SE diagonal, and he thus resolved the ambiguities in IMPASTO and COTINGA.

A few clues later and the grid was complete. Here are some of my favourites:

 
So another thoroughly entertaining puzzle from Tiburon. And how many of you spotted how symmetrical the puzzle was? Apart from the grid having 90° symmetry, the thematic entries were placed with 180° symmetry, as were PHILIP/LARKIN and WHOLE/NOVEL (from where the title comes).