A recent radio broadcast examined the history of chess on the BBC. Between 1958 and 1964 there were regular chess programmes on the Third Network (now Radio 3), a mixture of essays, interviews and games. Contributors included Alexander, Barden, Euwe, Fischer, Gligoric and Golombek. Some…
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Max Euwe makes the first move in Browne v Karpov (Amsterdam 1976) Tony Miles’ 1…a6 is not the worst insult Karpov has suffered during a game. Four years earlier Walter Browne showed his utter contempt for the World Champion by arriving at the board in…
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NTBCM was a funny spoof magazine edited by Murray Chandler. Borrowing the format of its venerable target, NTBCM published only one issue (in 1984), an entertaining mix of strange games, jokes and witty articles such as ‘How Weird Is Your Chess’ by Jon Speelman,…
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Chess scene from ‘The Wire’ ‘The Buys’ (2002) D’Angelo Barksdale: Yo, what was that? Wallace: Hm? D’Angelo Barksdale: Castle can’t move like that. Yo, castle move up and down and sideways like. Preston ‘Bodie’ Broadus: Nah, we ain’t playing that. Wallace: Yeah, look at the…
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‘If Gary is Gazza, Nigel is Nosher. Etymology? “Nigel Short” anagrams schoolboyishly into Nosher L. Git.’ Julian Barnes, ‘TDF: The World Chess Championship’ The New Yorker (December 1993) reproduced in Letters from London 1990-1995 (Picador, 1995), p.269 Background Short had said there were too many grandmasters around…
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Journalism ‘I tend to make the articles in The Spectator more wordy and The Times I make a little bit more lapidary in the style.’ Tunisgate ‘When I did my accounts after that event, I think I’d made eleven pounds profit.’ Being expelled from the…
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Samurai Chess: Mastering the Martial Art of the Mind Michael Gelb and Raymond Keene Aurum Press, 1997, 224pp., £15.95 Frankly I wish I’d never agreed to review this book. Criticism of it will inevitably seem like gratuitous Mondo knocking, and praise will be seriously…
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Carl Haffner’s Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavinic Harvill, 1999 First published in German as Carl Haffners Liebe zum Unentschieden, this English translation was even mini-launched at the Austrian Institute in London in the presence of (wait for it) GM Raymond Keene, a…
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