Word: reykjavik
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...first fun in this sort of riddle is to see how far the similarities go. Sister Walburga and Sister Mildred, the Lady Abbess's co-plotters and hatchet nuns, are obviously Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Peripatetic Sister Gertrude, who phones in nightly from Reykjavik or Mombasa and, in a German accent, recommends the study of Machiavelli, is our very own Secretary of Snake. Sister Felicity seems to be an unstable amalgam of George McGovern and John Dean...
...squally night two years ago, just when it seemed that Bobby Fischer was finally going to board a jet for Reykjavik, Iceland, when it looked as if his match with Boris Spassky for the world chess championship might actually take place, all hell broke loose at Kennedy International Airport. This time the perpetrator was not a freaked-out Fischer but a small boy who discovered the skittish grand master hiding in an airport bar and led a charge of newsmen to the scene. Bobby bolted out the door, across a highway and vanished into the gloom. His handlers meanwhile, fending...
Prophetic Dreams. The contestants had no monopoly on strangeness. Throughout the frantic days when it appeared that the match would be canceled, Gudmundur Thorarinsson comported himself with the kind of cool dignity befitting the president of the Icelandic Chess Federation and a Reykjavik city councilman. Except, that is, for that one moment when, by the light of the midnight sun, he assured some foreign friends that the match would take place because, based on consultations with a spiritualist, "prophetic dreams" and "certain powers" unique to his people, "I know a miracle will happen...
Still, upon hearing of the book's publication, Fischer reportedly told his law yers to "get Darrach." Bobby, who for years shunned women in favor of his trusty chess board and Bible, will probably be most annoyed by a pair of revelations. First, that during off moments in Reykjavik he frequently took to the mineral baths with a pair of adoring young lovelies in bikinis. And second, that for six months thereafter, while secluded in a California compound run by the Worldwide Church of God, he not only dated but, at his request, was introduced to "vivacious" girls with...
There is no proper way to re-create that intensity on the board; despite the book's schematics, the actual play at Reykjavik was not the stuff of legend. It is the text that manages to capture the historic and psychological undercurrents that made everyone believe for a moment that chess was indeed "everything." Steiner calls his own chess prowess "risible." His book, however, is deadly serious. The men he moves are real...