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Vlad always scares me a bit (as an impaler should), but always entertains as well. This required an enjoyable amount of lateral thinking, but came in at about the average time for a Prize.
FOI all the way down at 23, LOI all the way up at 4, which says a lot.
COD? Plenty of choice, but I’m going with the amusingly devious 25.

I found this loads of fun.
Many thanks to Vlad, and kudos to the Guardian for not messing things up...🤣

Not overly difficult by Impaler standards, took about median Prize solving time to fill the grid, but almost every clue provided a delightful PDM.

FOI 1d, LOI 10 (which I guessed early on but needed the crosser from the difficult 6 to confirm). One tricky solution is a "classic" word found almost exclusively in crosswords.

I'll somewhat arbitrarily declare 6 COD, though many were worthy. Some short solutions like 4, 21a and 22d were elegant. Hardly any clues were less than top-notch. Tour de force of cluing IMO.

25 was tied for second on my (too long to reproduce) list of COD contenders.

And 6 was tied for second in mine, geeker.
Agree with every word of what you have said. What a joy this was!

Superfluous musical [SPOILER ALERT] of the week (19): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEOgTGlCw7Q

One long solution will be familiar to participants in the clue setting competitions...

Specifically WPR (I had to look it up)...

Needed a brief hiatus but got going again quite quickly. Had a tea-tray moment for 22 (Which I was fairly sure of.) and 24, just as I pushed the off button ready to finish tomorrow.

Very fair and enjoyable.

Well, that was a real treat, even if it was at the difficult end of the scale - at leat for me, and so, anyone hoping for a breather after last week's mammoth Maskarade, might be a tad disappointed.

I was helped by some long anagrams although, that said, some do not appear in online anagram searchers.

14d had me puzzled for a while because I assumed the answer was a variant of the common word it looks like and, me being me, didn't bother to look up the definition in Chambers - way to go, Bren!

Also, I didn't know the 'female writer' in 19a and so, even though I was fairly sure of my answer, I always had that nagging doubt - at least until I finally Googled her.

COD: So many good clues but I'm going to award a tie between 14d and 25a but, on another day, I could just as easily have picked 24a or 7d.

Thanks to Vlad for a challenging but rewarding Prize crossword.

Stay safe:-)

Brendan, I'd never seen one of the words you mentioned until it appeared (as an optional variant) in WPR a couple of weeks ago. I entered a 💩 clue that sank without a trace, but the experience paid off tonight in the form of a write-in. 😁