ABC
Europe
A big fan of tricks and rebus, I normally hunt the Thursday ones down in the archives... but this is just embarrassing. It wasn't even that hard, just horribly tedious and far-fetched. To the vetting team: when you started discussing the need for a five-line explainer at the top, that moment would have been a good place to send the writer back to his desk. Paintings for painters, to start with? What a strange idea. Who let that one pass?? No link between the dual clues so that you have to fish them out of the list everytime you come back? Et par dessus-le-marché et au nom de tous les saints, il n'y a pas de thon dans la salade niçoise!
@Roberta I feel the need to add that I studied art history... so I am aware... But let's stick to crosswords and grammar: your clue is a past participle, your answer is one, etc. The info at the top states "paintings have been stolen", I was baffled to find painters there. It's just sloppy. There are enough Mona Lisas and Sunflowers around, if you want painters, you say painters. Or, as one commentator said, you say nothing, the "explainer" was really cumbersome.
@Comet had to ask Merriam.... who told us A to Z... shame
@Steven M. Agreed! Still, this Franco-Scot team has a couple of complaints: the Grand-Marnier clue was not grammatically correct and therefore made no sense to francophones, and Burns is NOT known as the peasant poet! The World Wide Wisdom tells me John Clare was, however. ??
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