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Easy clues, complicated endgame, ingenious construction, but what a bore finishing it off!

Agreed, but you did not have to go the whole hog with the boring bit - after a while you could take a short cut. What the perpetrators contained was particularly enjoyable.

I agree, both. It took me a while to complete this one, but I really enjoyed it when I got the theme and understood what it must have taken the setter to have put the whole thing together.

I agree, Greedy Kite, getting the quotations was not fun.

I'm surprised so few comments have been made here. This was a very satisfying puzzle to solve, despite all the counting (which you didn't have to persist with once the contents of the grid could be matched to the result of a search in ODQ).

But I was hoping someone on here might by now have explained how 27 down works. I can see the misprinted letter; it's the lengthy description of the intended (reversed?) contents that I can't fathom at all.

Ionacarr- look up the first 3 letters of the answer in Chambers, and perhaps slightly rethink how you see the clue

Thank you, gem94. It's always dispiriting to find you've been guilty of inflexible thinking. I'm certain I would never have investigated that possibility on my own.

Can someone please give me a hint to who the quotation is by? I've got the first word, and part of the second, but can't find anything useful in the ODQ.

It starts with "Thomas B." and ends with "Macaulay".

I agree with escuan. Not such a chore here since the second word of the quotation is in the ODQ keyword index. I only slogged as far as 26 across.

My only gripe is that difficulty of the endgame was yet again out of proportion to that of the grid fill.

Thanks kt, but I'm none the wiser. i can't find the quotation, or see the theme. My General Intelligence has obviously gone walkabout this week!