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Thanks to Imogen aka Vulcan for the weekly Prize challenge.

I enjoyed this puzzle a lot: extremely well clued, solidly on the gentle side but with more than enough tricky clues and felicities to render it Prize-worthy.

FOI 2. LOI 1d which I found unexpectedly baffling and was surprised to solve. One clue was doubly UK-centric: with crossers I got it via parsing (later verified via Google) but would have failed absent the crossers.

Too many standout clues to give a single COD. Co-winners 26, 3 and 13. 27 and 28 close behind. Skipping enumeration of the long list (10 others).
Can't see a theme or special feature yet, but will look again at the grid.

This was a rather odd offering by Imogen, in so muh as some of the clues took some real work to unpack. while others seemed to slot right in - helped enormously by the unusually high number of anagrams.

In terms of queries I had to Google the answer to 21d to make sure he was a physician and 24d which I'd never heard of (the answer that is, not the insurance company)

There are also a couple I still haven't parsed, namely 1d and 3d but the night is young.

COD: 27a - Another word I didb't know but enjoyed the wordplay, closely followed by 26a.

Thanks to Imogen for an enjoyable Prize puzzle.

How did you get on? Let us know in the comments.

Stay safe:-)

Ah! Just managed to parse 1d - very clever (the clue, not me!)

... and now got 3d:-)

My experience much like yours, Brendan.

A good portion of the grid seemed Vulcan-like (I think of V. as a Monday or early-week setter) in terms of solvability, but there were a number of clues I despaired of getting until pennies slowly dropped.

Hi Geeker,

As soon as I read your post I knew we had a very similar experience.

With 1d I had pretty much resigned myself to it being one of those where I was very confident it was correct but wouldn't be able to parse it, until that PDM moment which seemed to come of nowhere.

Seriously, I was just tuning into the World Series when it suddenly hit me!

Speaking of WS - Ohtani 10K + 3HR! Incredible

Brendan, I barely follow baseball any more but Ohtani is indeed incredible.
Back when I was more au courant I always liked Japanese players like Hideo Nomo, Hideki Matsui (of those great '90s Yankee teams) and Ichiro Suzuki. Good to see more of them (I've omitted lots of more recent stars) excelling in MLB.

Prize, Imogen, thanks.

Top half went in smoothly, bottom half not so much.

7d, 15a, 22a top 3.

Brendan, no problem with 1d, but don't have 27a.

Hi Ilippu,

27a - 2 letter "died" + single letter "over" and all that goes inside 5 letter "a flash" - definition is US singer (not human though)

Thanks Brendan. I had the 5 and 1, not the 2.
Didn't know that. Used to seeing the 4 letter version.