Listener 4087 Double Shuffling and Dealing by Auctor

[Ruthrobin]

We have found the clues a step up in difficulty from previous ones and had to go to the Internet for the quotation. Certainly not a puzzle for newcomers this week!

[Scorpius]

I'm surprised this has caused so much difficulty. Not that I found it easy, and I did misinterpret the first sentence of the preamble initially, but I'm not sure that it's really ambiguous. The placing of the parenthesis indicates fairly clearly what is to be written in the grid. It soon became clear in what ways some clues were affected and the opening of the quotation emerged fairly quickly, but I'm not sure how one would get the complete quotation without the internet because it doesn't appear to be in ODQ.
The four-word phrase jumped out. Writing the letters in the B cells in column order meant that I had to do very little arranging to see the whole thing.
This was certainly a bit harder than average, but by no means the toughest we've had from Auctor.

[Cruncher]

Finally got there. This week's tortoise! Got very confused with the shuffles and had to print a clean copy and start again to sort it out. Such a familiar quote but had no idea who the author was. Gosh to think I've been quoting classics all this time!

[jacinth]

I had 'one more look' last night and got there in the end, 12a was also the breakthrough for me. I suppose I was stumped for a while because I tend to get definitions first and work back from there. I still have one or two happenings to resolve, but they don't matter - I'm relieved to have finished! Certainly not an easy one, but enjoyable once I got going. Thanks, Auctor.

[rognov]

Like many others I found this one pretty difficult and strangely unsatisfying. I'm fairly sure I've finished it correctly, but there were various things to be 'solved' that didn't seem to add much to the overall picture. Maybe I've missed something here. On a quite different and general point, I find it really odd that the online Chambers Word Wizard quite often (a) produces words that aren't in its own online dictionary (ie, the search on the same page) and (b) doesn't produce words that are there in the 'hard copy' dictionary. See 23A, for an example of (b). Oh well, as it's free perhaps I should just be happy for the help it usually gives!

[perseverer]

rognov - I think the "problem" with Chambers is the number of different dictionaries they produce. The dictionary used for searches at the top of the WordWizard page is the 21stC dictionary which is not as extensive as the "Chambers Dictionary." Not sure what WordWizards is based on.