(Apologies for the late post - solved the puzzle earlier today, and forgot to write the blog!!)

This was a toughie, especially after the usual Rufus romp yesterday.  Some very unusual words and difficult wordplay.   There are a couple of examples below where I can’t quite explain the wordplay.

Took me a good half an hour to solve, possibly more - I wasn’t counting and it was several hours ago. 

ACROSS

1 V(1)-SAGE

9 M-ALLEE - a small eucalyptus tree

10 ANNE-(L)-IDA - segmented worms

11 RECOMBINANT DNA - reverse cryptic - “and” is an anagram of DNA, and recombinant would be the anagrind

13 SP-ILL-I(KIN)S - another name for jackstraws - SP (sine prole) is appearing a lot in crosswords just now

14 S-PIT

16 OR(i)B(i)S - ORIBIS are small African antelopes

18 F-RATERNIS-(desir)E - where RATERNIS = (restrain)*

21 GAVE UP THE GHOST - as in, sacked the ghost writer

23 A-R.R.-ANGER

25 SEA-L-ANTS

26 O-STEAL

DOWN

2 SA(LIE)RI - Antonio Salieri, the “baddie” in the play and movie, “Amadeus”

3 GRENOBLE - not altogether sure of the wordplay, something to do with GREY and NOBLE?

5 NO(<=TEN ANON)TE - NO NO NANETTE is a musical comedy, first produced in 1925, filmed as “Tea for Two” in 1950

6 EXE-’UNT - stage instruction meaning “they exit”

8 GUARAN(i)-TEE - the guarani is the unit of currency in Paraguay

12 BAKER STREET - again haven’t had time to work out the wordplay

13 SHOTG-LASS - SHOTG = (ghost)*

15 ARCH-IVES - Charles Ives (1874-1954), more famous in Crosswordland than in the real world?

17 BA-VARIA(tions)

20 QUANT-A

22 WELL(ie)

Something of a rarity for me: a Virgilius puzzle I didn’t enjoy all that much. I got the three thematic clues fairly quickly, probably because they’re not all that cryptic and I knew the quote from Shaw; I did think briefly that the puzzle would make use of US and British words for the same thing (e.g PAVEMENT/SIDEWALK, TAP/FAUCET) but it quickly became apparent that this wasn’t the case, although many of the clues mention variations on 13A and 20A.