Glenn, I'm in the same boat as you and am honestly extremely surprised at how hard this task is. When I started looking this morning, I thought for certain I'd find a command or modifier to let a search return context around a found message.
localize + map seems completely useless. Sure, it tells you other events happened nearby but there's no way to actually see the events. I'm not sure how anyone can claim that this is an alternative to using a subsearch to see surrounding events (unless there's some trick we're missing, in which case it should be documented).
As for subsearches, I think this might be a bug. We're using a trial (4.0.9) and I get the exact same behavior as you're describing with the "Missing LHS for AND" error. However, I only get that if I try to have the fields command spit out the start and end times (tried using 'earliest' and 'latest' to no avail as well).
I'm experimenting and maybe I can trick it. It's on my list for the next time I talk to our rep as well, because focused queries that show the context are extremely important.
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