Word: chess
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...Chess Games. The streets and taverns of 17th century Paris here teem with vignettes of squalor (two men playing a seesaw game over a fire for a prize of food) that make their own comment set against the distant pomp of the royal court. The musketeers move through both these worlds with equal ease, yet are part of neither. Their sworn allegiance is to the King, Louis XIII, and against Richelieu, but they are men of pride. Their greatest battle and concern are simply to stay alive. For though they would call themselves their own men, they belong to Louis...
...whiz-kid promotions in the corporate world is fading, but it is not quite over. Next month, David Kennedy assumes office as chief executive of Ireland's national airline, Aer Lingus-Irish at the age of 35. Kennedy, a former Irish chess champion with a dry wit, has made it to the top of the $100 million-a-year line in twelve years. One of these was spent in the U.S., from which Aer Lingus gets much of its traffic, and the others in Ireland, mostly devoted to computerizing the line's operations. He succeeds Michael J. Dargan...
Writing personal histories, but not evaluating specific games or chess theory, Schonberg displays arresting personalities and tells dozens of famous stories. There is the remark with which Tarrasch began his 1908 match with then world champion Emanuel Lasker: "To you, Dr. Lasker, I have only three words, check and mate." He lost. Or Paul Morphy, the American who was acknowledged as the world's best player during a career of only a year and a half in the 1850s, and who died insane, a hater of the game. And the Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca, arguably the greatest player...
...difficult times, paternally chiding them for their faults. He cannot resist the music critic's temptation to liken them to composers, setting both grandmasters and musicians in parallel hierarchies. Capablanca--"pure, classic, elegant... yet capable of demonic force in his great moments... the complete technician" is the Mozart of chess, and Alekhine, "a nervous tiger who stalked his prey with involuntary physical twitchings and psychic lust" is Wagner. Fischer, Schonberg asserts, surpasses even Wagner in terms of "monomania...
...touting them all, Schonberg strains his expletives and his description. Steinitz, "born lame, heroic above the torso and a cripple below... had a grudge against the world, and the world returned it." Pillsbury "was genuinely admired as a human being as well as one of the chess geniuses...