History

Chess Treasures of Raymond Keene OBE

As a Chess Collector, my visit to the home of Raymond Keene was an eyeopener. I was not expecting the variety of…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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…

The Obliteration of Memory

Empires are conquered twice: first by armies, and then by the erasure of memory.