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20 - Def urgent - old, man introduced to intercourse.

Thank you for the 28 hint chrise. I guess that counts as a themester too.

Hi Jvector,

20d - 2 letter "old" then single letter "introduction to intercourse" + 4 letter"man" - definition is "urgent"

28a - 7 letter word for "lecturer's with the last letter "cycling" to the front - definition is that after the 'cycling' the lecturer is now "becoming obsessive"

Agree with others Brockwell becoming a favourite compiler and a thoughtful one. Thank you Brockwell for always popping in to forum much appreciated. Found this one quite difficult but interesting , struggled with
theme and still one or two to parse.FOI 11. LOI. 17 which I got early but wasn’t sure
COD so many 13, 25, 9

Thanks Brendan for enquiring about my back. It took the habitual 5 days and is now a lot better. Unfortunately, my hips are still very bad.

I persisted with the crossword for a bit, but found it too hard. I ended up cheating with DanWord, but I still couldn't actually parse a number of the answers, eg 21d, 24d - what had Sri to do with it?
I also couldn't see the number of theme words identified earlier, despite getting the theme. I can't see the theme in 1ac, 13ac, 11ac, 19ac. Of the ones I got my FOI was 4d. My COD is 9d, which took me ages to get the first word. I loved that book.

Even after reading the forum, which helped with 20d, I'm stuck on a lot the SW corner: 15d, 17a, 25a, 27a, also 28a.
FOI was 5a.

I can see quite a few themed answers but must be missing a lot: were 11a known as 3 because of their initials? Is 19a themed?

OK have got 28a after using Crossword Solver on the uncycled version: obvious, of course

And now finished, with some use of CrosswordSolver.

LoI: 17a. (Should have got it sooner from def and 2 crossers: all I could think of was "salad".) (Though the 15d crosser was very late too)

An entertaining puzzle: not sure I found all the thematics. Brockwell said there were 16. I think I found 13, possibly two more: what did I miss?

I found:
Across: 5, 10 ?(t.. s.. beetle?), 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19 (well, there's what seems to be a quote connecting them, never heard it before), 23, 24? (T.. t.. sounds vaguely familiar in one order or the other), 26, 28
Down: 3, 9, 24

There could have been a Lily.

I think 25a is thematic. "Theme" concatenated with 2nd word of 25a is a gemstone.

Also 22d...there's a famous one in Oslo, which city has a thematic nickname.

24a is definitely thematic for the reason you mentioned.
I didn't consider 19a thematic. There's a hidden "PEAS", but that seems to be a commercial rather than generic term so I DQ'd it.