Cryptic crossword No 3,077

Hi Henri... This felt like the kind of examination I still have nightmares about! I crawled through about half the down clues and a guess at 10a yielded a vague notion of the likely theme... finally a few more started to drop in... but by the end I probably revealed about 25% and needed the annotations for parsing. None of this for me detracts from the lovely and clever clues which I can very happy appreciate in retrospect! 2d, 6d, 15d, 17d and 17a are favourites. Thanks for the education!

Got nearly all the way through. Beaten by two themers that I did not know and one themer (17a) where I spotted neither the def nor the device! Neat idea. 2d, 7d, 13d, 17d my faves. Thanks. PM

Quite a tour de force, which must have been great fun compiling! For me, the down clues were a good old-fashioned work-out which I enjoyed and did ok with. With crossers in place I managed several of the across solutions simply from the definitions, but even having intuited the theme the keys to the wordplay were out of my reach. I wonder, did you already have ‘the Knowledge’ or were you working from a good A to Z? If the latter, would this resource work as well for a solver as a setter? …

The theme and execution are tremendous; the same cannot be said of my skills, unfortunately (9a told me that I had walked down the wrong path). Nevertheless, there are lots to like from the ones I managed to crack through, including the aforementioned 9a, 3d, 7d, 17d, and 18d. Thank you!