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Thanks to Phi for an enjoyable puzzle. I just wish I’d read the title and preamble more carefully before I started but that’s a perennial misstep of mine.

Lovely puzzle as usual from Phi, and typically clever construction. Great fun and reasonably gentle after some challenging puzzles this year so far

All very doable and fun but speaking of the preamble, I felt that to say "All other clues contain an extra letter in their wordplay" was misleading, and it would have made more sense as "All other clues generate an extra letter by their wordplay". I unravelled that quite early on though, so not a major frustration.

Grid completed, but part of the preamble still not understood: “answers that could be entered like the three thematic words”. I can see what has been done to the three thematic words, but don’t see how that could apply to the other answers. Any ideas?

I believe it means that in answers that could be split into two words, the definition of the whole appears between the wordplay for each of the two halves

That confused me too but I concluded it meant any clue with an even number of letters, i.e. divisible by two.

Sorry, I meant any clue that led to an answer with an even number of letters.

Robt@3. I recall many years ago discussing this with the late James Leonard, then editing the EV. His view was that "wordplay" was ambiguously interpretable as either (partial) clue content or the outcome of the process. So I think he'd have appreciated your point. And for that reason he insisted on preambles referring to "subsidiary indications". But like you I didn't allow any of this to spoil my enjoyment of the puzzle.

Really struggled with this but got there in the end. I found it to be a difficult, but very enjoyable (once I twigged what was going on), puzzle.

Excellent puzzle. If I wanted to pick a nit it would be the ambiguity of “their” in the preamble; but I don’t so I won’t. Thanks to Phi.