The Article

Member ratings Well argued: 100% Interesting points: 100% Agree with arguments: 100% 1 rating - view all I have been in Crete on vacation. Rather than leave my loyal readers in the lurch, with no weekly chess column, I have scoured my archives to find a couple of games from my Cretaceous Period, which have hitherto eluded proper public analysis.

President Macron arrives in London this Wednesday to unveil, alongside  Prime Minister Burnham, the arrival in Britain of the utterly amazing Bayeux Tapestry. It was made under the auspices of William the Conqueror’s Queen  Matilda and it tells the story of the founding moment in English history: the Norman invasion and occupation. The vivid cartoon strip colours of the wonderful tapestry, normally on display in the Norman Cathedral of Bayeux, seem as fresh today as a millennium ago.

If you asked me to describe a picture-perfect English village it would sound something like Piddington in Oxfordshire. The conurbation of 350 people has a church dating back to around 1300, a village hall, extensive playing fields and used to have a pub, though regrettably this has since closed. It featured in the Doomsday Book, compiled after the Norman Conquest, and is the resting place of the Dymock poet John Drinkwater.

My mother was greatly interested in education, particularly in my education. By the age of one, it was decided that I should go to university. “He will be an engineer,” she would say to anyone who would listen. My mother wanted to impart to me as much knowledge as she possessed herself. Part of that was my musical education. She started to teach me the piano when I was seven years old. I was hopeless. She also wanted to teach me to speak German. She started with the grammar.

Joseph Conrad was as furiously critical of Herman Melville, a serious rival in maritime literature, as he was of Dostoyevsky. Conrad’s unwelcome reputation as a nautical novelist helps to explain his vitriolic condemnation of Melville’s work. He hated Melville’s romanticism, insincerity and mysticism, and didn’t want to be coupled with him as an exotic writer of the sea.

Member ratings This article has not been rated yet. Be the first person to rate this article. This summer has been a stressful period for presidents and aspirants of world sporting bodies. The President of FIFA, the world football federation, Gianni Infantino remains under severe pressure. Similarly KIRSAN Ilumzhinov declared his candidacy for the presidency of FIDÉ, the world chess Federation, on Monday July 20, World Chess Day.

Anthony Burgess called the novels of the underrated Olivia Manning “the most important long work of fiction written by an English woman novelist since the war”. Like D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), The Levant Trilogy (1977-80) shows the effect of war on the emotional and intellectual lives of civilian characters, though Cairo was much closer to the front than Cornwall. An understanding of the military background is crucial to the meaning of the novel.

Records have fallen at the biggest-ever British Chess Championships. The nine-day event in the University of Warwick ended with something almost too neatly symbolic to have been invented: two record-breaking young stars of the game carrying away the two greatest prizes. Seventeen-year-old GM Shreyas Royal won the overall British title.

The life of the Jewish-Hungarian photographer André Kertész had three distinct phases. He lived in Hungary from July 1894 to 1925; in Paris from October 1925 to 1936; in New York from October 1936 to September 1985. Nearly six feet tall, he was thin, with brown hair, blue-grey eyes and olive skin. He served with the defeated Austro-Hungarian army in World War One, was wounded in the chest and took a bullet a quarter of an inch below his heart. In hospital, he caught typhoid fever and malaria.

The next two years belong, in a curious sense, to Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) and chess. Exhibitions, celebrations and simultaneous displays are appearing across New York, with the cheerful persistence of official notices, except that these notices concern art, genius and the mysterious kingdom of the sixty-four squares.