‘Chess is, famously, an activity entirely unrelated to the rest of life: from this springs its fragile profundity.’ Julian Barnes, ‘TDF: The World Chess Championship’ The New Yorker (December 1993) reproduced in Letters from London 1990-1995 (Picador, 1995), p.249 ‘We could even make…
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‘In other sports, the persecution of some players, coaches or officials by the press not rarely offers a sad spectacle. With chess, the main problem is that the game is too esoteric by nature to satisfy the interest of the public at large . ….
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‘Security passes were something I never felt the need to wear, particularly when coupled with Rambo [John Stevens]. The way we were viewing it was, “If our hairdos aren’t our pass, well, we’ll pass on the gig, thank you.” Rambo and I got into so…
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‘The British School is characterized by a great show of brilliancy. No idea is too bizarre for them, no concept too fantastic. They are hard workers, to be sure, but rather bent on finding new sensational effects than on constructing something useful. For the main…
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Inspired by Tony Miles’ famous two-word book review, several readers have offered suggestions for chess books that should never be written. There are more on Kingpin’s Facebook page. They say that everyone has a crap book in them, so please send us your ideas! (Mig…
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‘If you watch a video of an old Wimbledon final or Ryder Cup match, you aren’t really re-analysing, you are merely reminding yourself of what happened and suffusing yourself again with the emotions provoked by the original events. But a chess game, after it…
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‘As a man Hugh was a wholly delightful companion. He was extremely lively and talkative, full of ideas and genuinely interested in everything that his friends were doing. He liked arguing for its own sake, but was never quarrelsome. He was the kind of person…
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Edward Winter bemoans the lack of pen-portraits in chess writing: ‘a highly demanding form of writing which requires no particular chess expertise yet is almost universally avoided nowadays’. Chess writers are, with a few exceptions, chess experts rather than writers and rarely venture outside their…
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Hugh Alexander: my favourite game ‘good judgement rates at least as high in chess as accurate analysis’ Asking someone who has been playing tournament chess for well over thirty years for his favourite game, is rather like asking an ageing Lothario about his favourite girlfriend. He…
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