![]() ![]() He now lives in Japan, occasionally granting interviews to Icelandic radio in which he expounds his theories of global Jewish conspiracies. Yet after beating Spassky in Reykjavik, he refused to defend his title in 1975 and became a notorious recluse. He is one of three or four reasonable candidates for the title of greatest chess player who ever lived. The standard biography is repeated: the early childhood in New York chess clubs, winning the US championship at 14, missing out on one world championship cycle through a fit of pique, and then finally bulldozing his way to the match against Spassky by crushing three of the top players in the world.įischer's run of 20 straight victories against top opposition at that time still stands as an unparalleled display of dominance. The one interviewee notably absent, however, is Fischer himself. His own recollections about his chess-playing career in the USSR, how victory afforded his family a "palatial" two-room apartment but defeat meant he was banned from playing abroad for two years, constitute some of the best parts of the book. ![]() Far from being an obedient Soviet puppet, for example, the brilliant Spassky was a semi-dissident playboy. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, and their impressive team of researchers, have combed Soviet records and American intelligence files, and interviewed nearly every surviving actor in the drama, to give a more nuanced account of a match that was characterised by extreme mutual paranoia. At least, that's how the story usually goes. ![]()
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