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I am very annoyed with myself!! After ages grid staring yesterday and throwing the towel in in favour of the Inquisitor (which, BTW, is superb), I spot the relevant phrase in ten minutes this morning. Proof that taking a break resets the scrambled grey matter.

I couldn't agree more Gitto,

After a comparatively quick grid solve I spent ages on a fruitless grid search. I then put it aside to do the Guardian Prize and, upon revisiting, spotted everything in less than 15 minutes!

The editors are catering for Times subscribers so they should assume that those tackling the Listener are familiar with the difficulty presented by the Mephisto.

Editors may tidy up the odd clue and the preamble but they’re not going to be purposefully making anything easier so the difficulty level depends on what setters are submitting

upsetter - I find it amusing that you link the Listener with Mephisto as, a few weeks ago, Aedites was a prizewinner on Mephisto.

I agree with you to an extent candledave - the editors can only publish what is submitted, so it's up to the setters.

But there is a backlog of about 2 years at the moment so they could just not publish some of the easier ones and reduce the backlog a bit. Which maybe they are already doing to an extent.

Candledave - I assume someone must either 'brief' a general degree of difficulty +/or accept puzzles which reflect a chosen spectrum of difficulty..

Sh - I agree that they could do that and arguably should do that but that it is not how they do it at the moment

Jack@38,

I've never come across that expression 'close enough for jazz' before, but I really like it.

Now I just have to find (or orchestrate) an opportunity to work it into a sentence 😄

'close enough for jazz' was an expression often used by classically trained musicians when they were slumming it in jazz bands.