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Toughie No. 8 — cryptic crossword

A toughie puzzle: 40 clues on a 15×15 grid. Solve it online — check your answers as you go, ask for a hint, and read how each clue works once it is solved.

Across

  1. Prickly growths cropping up in Pacific action (5)
  2. Groom with cipher makes rules on clothing (5,4)
  3. Sound German car, perhaps, with nothing on (5)
  4. Allowing gent, lit up, to run riot (7)
  5. Bring out local fifty-one? Hush! (7)
  6. Slot in a fresh part of the throat (6)
  7. Circles of sex appeal held in the eyes (6)
  8. Duck with tamale cooked makes porridge (7)
  9. No room left at the theatre, but a good hand at cards (4,5)
  10. Lasses first seen in Greece, Italy, Romania, Latvia, Serbia (5)
  11. One racing downhill, or a ball hit high in the air (5)
  12. Decrees in disorder at the official home (9)
  13. Kitchen wrapping can frustrate (7)
  14. Father embracing the woman, ran off (6)
  15. User caught inside mad dictatorship (6)
  16. Titles I reordered for the snob (7)
  17. At home with the verb form, extremely powerful (7)
  18. Expensive enamel hides an Eastern instrument, say (5)
  19. Elks added, wandering, make tracks (9)
  20. Demos organised over rounded roofs (5)

Down

  1. Visit gone bad? Cancel (4,3)
  2. Mouser stuck in Arctic atmosphere (3)
  3. Boy king, time and one for all players (5)
  4. I do it stupidly! (5)
  5. Gods rebuilt as man's best friends (4)
  6. Some reply, awkwardly, to those who take on staff (9)
  7. Clog past its best was deliberately wrecked (9)
  8. Girl at the local bank makes a peace offering (5,6)
  9. Old flame, healthy but small, breathes out (7)
  10. Fashionable new southern locals (4)
  11. Massive number by the Yorkshire river — someone seriously rich (11)
  12. Chairman shaken, holding nothing — a mouth organ (9)
  13. Unaltered, but strangely not connected (9)
  14. Easy catches for models? (7)
  15. Interminable, seen in a friendless spell (7)
  16. Enid turned up to eat (4)
  17. Cadet drilled and performed (5)
  18. Notes arranged by the shorthand typist (5)
  19. Drive off right into a seedy bar (4)
  20. Man turned round here! (3)

More: Toughie cryptic crosswords.

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