Features
Chess as metaphor for Life
As a chess grandmaster, author of over 200 books on chess and mind sports, and someone who has dedicated his life to the intricate dance of…
Author
Ray Keene OBE
History
The Samurai Mind
Five centuries after Miyamoto Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings, its lessons on strategy, discipline and decision-making remain startlingly relevant. Grandmaster Raymond Keene OBE argues…
Opinion
Why The Future Belongs to Players
Beginning with Terence Tao's provocative observation, Grandmaster Raymond Keene OBE examines how chess, football, philosophy, and modern competition reveal a profound shift in the way excellence…
History
Staunton, Shakespeare and Chess
Howard Staunton devoted years to editing Shakespeare, but was England's greatest chess master equally drawn to the Bard because Shakespeare himself understood the royal game? From…
History
Does the word chess originate with Julius Caesar’s name?
Do words carry hidden histories? Beginning with neglected lines from Hamlet and Tamburlaine, Grandmaster Raymond Keene follows an eccentric trail through Shakespeare, Russian, Welsh, Latin and…
History
Did Leonardo da Vinci play chess?
What do Howard Staunton and Leonardo da Vinci have in common? Above all, a remarkable versatility, a capacity to excel across a startling range of intellectual…
Features
Empires of the Mind
“Via the squares on a chessboard, the Indians explain the movement of time and the age, the higher influences which control the world and the ties…
History
Barry Martin - In Memoriam
For Barry Martin, chess was never merely a game and art was never merely an image. Somewhere between Staunton and Duchamp, the two became one.
History
The Second Battle of Waterloo
Waterloo was not England's last great victory on French soil. In 1843, Howard Staunton crossed the Channel to fight a very different kind of battle.
History
Defender of the Faiths
The first great chess grandmaster did not play in London, Paris or Moscow, but in the dazzling court of the Abbasid Caliphs.
History
Gens Una Sumus
Chess has crossed more frontiers than any army, conquered more hearts than any empire, and united more cultures than perhaps any other game in history.
Features
How a mediaeval thinker out of the box: Stupor Mundi, helped me to solve a Chinese puzzle
Inspiration often comes from unlikely sources.
History
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, German intellectuals and the First World War
Conan Doyle's attitude to war seems, from the tenor of this passage, to be one of stoic acceptance, rather than enthusiastic celebration.
Strategy
Draughts, also known as Checkers
Before computers conquered chess, one extraordinary mathematician proved that human intuition could still outthink silicon.
Strategy
Go and the Atomic Bomb
As Hiroshima vanished in the first atomic explosion of war, two Go masters calmly reset their scattered stones and continued their game.
History
On the Shoulders of Dwarves
The greatest discoveries are often made not by choosing between science and the humanities, but by refusing to recognise the divide.
Strategy
Survival of the Fattest
From Darwin to Nietzsche, from giraffes to grandmasters, the battle for survival has shaped far more than the natural world.
History
Virgil’s wrong door - this way to the egress
The greatest literary mysteries are not always hidden in forgotten manuscripts. Sometimes they have been lying in plain sight for two thousand years.