"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall "Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman "A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today; "One of my favourite blogs" - Stumbling and Mumbling; "Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife
England's chess prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan broke another world age record last week, reports Leonard Barden in the Guardian. At a tournament held in Aix-en-Provence, she achieved her first international master norm at the age of 11 years and four months.
This made her the youngest female player to achieve this feat, beating the record of Judit Polgár, who later became the highest-rated female player in history. She didn't manage it until the age of 11 years and 9 months.
International master is the title one below grandmaster in chess. To achieve it a player must achieve three such norms, which are acquired by playing at the required strength in a tournament, and reach a high enough rating on the international list.
Bodhana is also two-thirds of the way towards becoming a woman grandmaster. If she achieves her third norm for this in the next year, she will beat the record for the youngest holder of the title.
The separate title of woman grandmaster was introduced to give the stronger women players something to strive for. Whether it's down to nature or nurture, few of them are able to qualify for the grandmaster title the best male players hold.
But Judit Polgár became a grandmaster, and it's significant that her father (something of a chess Richard Williams) never allowed her or her sisters to play in women's tournaments but always had them competing with the men in open tournaments.
The appearance of a talent like Bodhana, and the large increase in the number of girls taking up the game, gives you hope that these separate titles will one day disappear.
Later. The Guardian reports that Judit Polgár has said she will decline this offer:
Polgár, 49, said later in a Facebook post that she was grateful to be asked but added: "I do not feel enough strength within me to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, so I am unable to accept the request."
Judit Polgár, widely regarded as the strongest ever woman chess player, is to to be offered the presidency of Hungary.
The Guardian reports that the Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar will meet Polgar to discuss the matter on Monday:
"Our country needs unity, peace and a president that all Hungarians can be proud of," he wrote on social media. "Judit Polgár's name has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades."
The announcement by Magyar follows a months-long standoff between the newly elected leader and Tamás Sulyok, the president appointed during former leader Viktor Orbán’s time in power.
Since his landslide victory in April, Magyar has repeatedly called on Sulyok to step down, accusing him of being an Orbán "puppet" who had failed to stand up for the country as Orbán’s rightwing, nationalist Fidesz party was criticised for weakening democratic institutions and undermining the rule of law.
Last week Hungary’s parliament – where Magyar’s Tisza party holds a two-thirds majority – voted to back a constitutional amendment that included an immediate end to Sulyok’s term.
In the video above, the inimitable American grandmaster Ben Finegold takes us through three characteristic wins by Polgar. It seems it's impossible now to turn off the subtitles in an embedded video, so please watch it on YouTube if they distract you.
"Progressive politicians must see social media as a means to an end. If they’re swallowed by social media, they’ll lose their moral core. What’s more – and much worse – making social media the training school of modern politics risks giving a megaphone to fascists and racists who are able to preach their gospel of hate to millions without interruption." Sam Bright on the curse of influencer-politicians.
Jack Dyson reports on the consequences of falling school rolls. One in three councils expect more than a fifth of primary school places will be unfilled next year.
"We used to think AI-generated fiction would always be obvious, and we were not prepared. Over the coming years, agents, editors, and slush readers at every level are going to need to educate themselves on how AI writes." Bona Books inadvertently bought a short story written by Artificial Intelligence for an anthology of queer speculative fiction.
Jennifer Davey offers a short round up of football-related contributions to Hansard over the years.
Malcolm Pein, the English Chess Federation’s delegate to the game's governing body FIDE and a candidate for its next deputy president, is interviewed about the long fight to break Russia's political grip on chess: "Russia has basically hijacked FIDE – just go to the FIDE website and look at where the employees come from: Russian head of PR, Russian head of legal and so on."
"This is as much a novel of working class intellectualism (Hamer deploys a quotation from Macbeth without ostentation) as it is about the compromises of electoral politics. Shawcross and his children want comfort and security and health, but they also want the fruits of the knowledge and experience held by this culture that has turned them into marginal drudges of the machine age." With the accession of Andy Burnham imminent, Discontinued Notes looks again at the work of Howard Spring, 'the Dickens of Manchester'.
Stop sniggering at this story from HFM News there. I shall explain.
Market Harborough used to have two working men's clubs in the town centre. The one that stood towards the top of the High Street was known as "Top Club" and the one on The Square was "Bottom Club".
Top Club is now a branch of Zizzi, while Bottom Club now houses a Waterstones and a Pret a Manger. They don't call Harborough "the Notswolds" for nothing.
The white building in the photo above was also part of Bottom Club. Its ground floor was where the club's snooker tables were to be found and where Market Harborough's British heavyweight boxing champion Jack Gardener once trained. This is the building for which a planning application for conversion to an HMO has been made.
When I was a lad, I sometimes played snooker there because one of our gang's dad was a member, so they let us use the tables if it was quiet and we behaved ourselves. In those days it was possible to enter the club on the Square and walk through it all the way to that white building, so there must have been some demolition when the front of the club was converted into the two shop units.
Market Harborough chess club met for a while in what is now the first floor of Waterstones. This was at a time when what had been the town's roughest pub, The Talbot, had just closed and some of its ne'er-do-well customers had taken to using the Bottom Club instead. The result was that the club lost its alcohol licence for a while over concerns about drug use.
So it was that, having won a county league game with a particularly outrageous swindle, I lent over the board after my opponent had resigned and asked: "Would you like a glass of orange juice?"
And The Talbot? As this is the Notswolds, it's now a Hotel Chocolat.
I know what we need: a reggae song about the famous clash between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge in 1946.
The words are by Tudor Rickards and the music and production are by the chess grandmaster Jonathan Levitt. I suspect there is some AI involved too.
Incidentally, Charles Masterman's daughter Margaret Masterman, an unjustly overlooked philosopher, was in the room when Popper and Wittgenstein met too.
"We talked about how we need to fight Reform in the way they need to fight Donald Trump, and she gave me some choice advice, which I'm not going to repeat because that would be unfair on her."
He's also been talking to PoliticsHome – that's a quote from an interview they've posted this evening.
"Pressed" (as if he needed pressing) to say more his meeting with Hillary Clinton, he added:
"She said you have to be very strong and stand up to bullies and don't cave in and cosy up to them. She didn't say she was criticising Keir Starmer, but I think the approach we [the Lib Dems] have taken, and the approach that someone like the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, has taken, is the sort of approach she will endorse."
He described Clinton as "very friendly and very warm!: "You could tell that she realised that we had shared values."
The interviewer, Zoe Crowther, then turned to restlessness among Liberal Democrat MPs. This is part of Ed's answer:
"I'm restless like they are… I share their restlessness," Davey told PoliticsHome, while stressing that his MPs and the party “work really well together”.
However, in a bid to face down his critics, the Lib Dem leader pointed to his electoral record.
"The polls are the polls, but the elections are the elections," he told PoliticsHome.
"Winning elections is what we've done under my leadership. If we make net gains in May, it will be the eighth year in a row we've made net gains, the sixth under my leadership. It's never happened before. That's a continual increase, year on year.
"This year we could well beat Labour and the Tories for the number of councillors we elect for the second year in a row, and it’s never happened previously."
He insisted that the Lib Dems are "still the most united parliamentary party" despite recent negative briefings.
The MPs know how well the party as done in elections under Ed Davey – I mean, they would, wouldn't they? – but that success is not a complete answer to their restlessness. I suspect that restlessness is rooted in disappointment that achieving the best result by a Liberal party in over a century in 2024 has done so little to raise our profile.
You can complain about media bias, but we have to ask whether our style of campaigning is one of the causes. We adopted the "three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can't win here" approach that won us spectacular by-election victories in the last parliament at the general election too, and are still using it two years on.
Ask the public what the Lib Dem approach to the economy is, and they would be justified in asking how they are supposed to know, even if they've noticed the stand-alone proposals we have made.
And this concentration on target seats in the South of England has coincided with a further fall in our core vote. Yes, we're now in a novel political landscape, but in council by-elections where we have not campaigned, there hardly seems to be a Lib Dem vote at all.
To end on a happier note, Ed also talks about chess:
Davey – similarly to Chancellor Rachel Reeves – played chess competitively until he was about 12 years old, though he said he would "not put myself up as a great chess player" anymore.
"Playing the long game, that's the key thing in chess," he said.
Ed may be pleased to learn that my blog post about his chess game with Mike Ross in Hull was responded to on Bluesky by the eight-time Russian chess champion Peter Svidler.
I also liked Svidler's comment on Rachel Reeves.
timid, indecisive, unwilling to commit to even temporary sacrifices when the situation calls for a reassessment, and drastic measures might be needed.
the chess game is meh too.
Most Liberal Democrat MPs, and most of the limited number of target seats we have yet to win, are in the South of England, with inevitable consequences for the policy positions we adopt.
So it's good to see two reports on BBC News about Ed Davey visiting areas in the North where we hope to do well in next month's elections.
One is about a visit to Stockport, where the report says we are "eyeing full control". Ed also spoke of the party making gains "in places like Preston and Manchester and Trafford".
He is pictured sewing a blazer at a Stockport school uniform supplier he visited with Lisa Smart. This hardly counts as a stunt, and the media - local television in particular - wants pictures to go with our news stories. As I've said before, this is something Leave grasped and Remain failed to grasp during the EU referendum campaign.
It's just that I feel sorry for the kid who's going to be put into isolation for having a wonky blazer when the schools go back.
As it's in the Manchester commuter belt, parts of Stockport have a lot in common with some of the seats we hold in the South East of England. This is less true of Hull, where Ed has also been.
Here the Liberal Democrats have a one-seat majority on the council and are looking to increase that - a third of the seats are up for election next month.
Hull has long been a fight between Labour and the Lib Dems (you might call it a "two-horse race"), but Reform UK won the mayoral election here last year. So he turned his fire on them
""People have been very disappointed in the Reform mayor who's frankly missing in action. He's done nothing for the region."
and
"Nigel Farage backs Donald Trump left right and centre. He would have taken Britain into this war. He should take some responsibility for the high petrol prices people are paying and higher mortgage costs."
And the gentle stunt? I'm pleased to say that, as you can see in the video above, Ed was filmed playing chess with Mike Ross, the Lib Dem council leader of Hull City Council, on what looks to be one of Rishi Sunak's much-maligned chess tables.
Peter Juul argues that Donald Trump sees America not as the leader of a global posse bringing international gangsters to heel, but as a mob boss threatening America’s allies and neighbours while carving up the world with other gangster powers.
"The government’s plans will patch up the water system, particularly with the boost in revenue from bill payers. But the private sector has found unanticipated ways to maximise profits in the past and may well do so again. Rather than continually tweaking the failed private model, the only real route to operating water in the public interest is for it to be in public ownership." Kate Bayliss and Frances Cleaver say is treating the symptoms of the water industry but not their ultimate cause.
Britain’s swift population fell by two-thirds between 1995 and 2023. Emma Beddington lists 10 ways we can provide these beautiful birds with the help they need.
Josh Taylor asks how Australia can sell its social media ban for young people to the world when the evidence suggests it is not working: "When the age assurance technology trial released its final report before Australia’s under-16s social media ban came into effect last year, its first finding was: age assurance can be done privately, efficiently and effectively. Four months since the ban came into effect, we can say that was – to paraphrase Yes Minister – a courageous statement."
Richard Norton-Taylor reviews Antonia Senior's Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire: "Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his 'Red Empire' was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow. This included information about partisans and individuals hostile to the Soviet Union, and about how much support they would get from the Western allies."
"Not long after, in 1845, inventor Charles Wheatstone attended a demonstration in London. Chess legend Howard Staunton played against his rival George Walker over the South Western Railway line between Portsmouth and London. Müller-Pohl describes how witnesses found the match “rather tedious,” but it received a lot of press." (Roughly) Daily on Victorian e-sports.
British chess phenom Bodhana Sivanandan has made history by shooting to the top of the UK chess rankings after a sensational start to 2026, the English Chess Federation is pleased to report.
The 11-year-old from North London has rocketed to the number one English female spot. She is rated higher than the top women in all the other UK nations, and she has also broken into the world’s top 100 women for the first time, currently sitting at number 72.
World chess rankings are compiled by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and updated each month. In the April list, Sivanandan replaced four-time British Women’s Champion Lan Yao, aged 25, as the English federation’s top player. ...
It is an extraordinary rise for a Harrow schoolgirl who took up the game during lockdown after finding a chessboard and set in a bag her father wanted to throw out.
In the summer of 2022, as I blogged at the time, Bodhana was selected to play for England women's team at the chess olympiad. The ECF reckons this made her the youngest person ever to represent England internationally in any sport.
In the British Championship last simmer, then aged 10, she made history by becoming the youngest female player to defeat a male grandmaster. In another event she beat the former women's world champion Mariya Muzychuk – you can see the game on YouTube.
Our Trivial Facts of the Day both come from a post by Richard James, who was my captain when I played chess for Richmond & Twickenham long ago. He is writing about the annual Varsity chess match:
Aleister Crowley, "the wickedest man in the world", ... played for Cambridge in 1896 and 1897, while Harold Davidson, "the rector who was eaten by a lion" (he was actually mauled rather than eaten, but that’s jumping ahead), represented Oxford between 1901 and 1903.
As I've said before, it's great fun on my Trivia Desk, but you have to work weekends. Both Aleister Crowley and Harold Davidson (AKA the Rector of Stiffkey) have good Wikipedia entries.
"Whether it is the private contractors paid enormous sums of public money to bring prisoners to court failing to bring prisoners to court, or technology procured at vast public expense simply not working, or entire court buildings being shut down because the roof is falling in, the Crown Courts every single day endure absurd, entirely-fixable inefficiencies which contribute significantly to the backlog of work." The Secret Barrister explains that abolishing most jury trials will not touch the main causes of delay in the legal system.
Paul Bernal argues that banning children from social media is a very bad idea: "For the most part, most kids, most of the time, are able to navigate the internet – and in particular social media – in ways that work. Rather than being a cesspit of trolling and misinformation, the internet mostly works. Just like for the grown-ups, the internet is simply part of their lives – how they organise themselves, how they get information, how the socialise, how they do their (home)work, how they find entertainment, how they listen to music and watch television and movies, how they date, how they shop and much more."
"You only have to take a look recent exam papers to see the problem. For example, when my colleague Catherine Gower and I surveyed 219 GCSE, AS and A-level history papers issued in the summer of 2023, we found only 6 per cent of 991 exam questions directed students to discuss women (37 per cent directed students to discuss men)." Natasha R, Hodgson shows that women are largely absent from the questions, sources, and mark schemes that shape how history is taught and assessed in schools in England.
Municipal Dreams reviews Ned Hewitt's Housing the People of Leicester: A History of Social Housing: "Spending cuts and a cross-party emphasis on rehousing slum dwellers (previously excluded from council housing dues to its relatively high rents) from 1930 had their own impact. The North Braunstone Estate, built as a slum clearance estate, is one of many across the country that reflected both these aspects and suffered a resultant social stigma."
National Museums Scotland tells the fascinating story of the Isle of Lewis chessmen and their discovery.
"Living in the Past was a song in five/four time, with jazz flute solos, and grumpy lyrics about how the hippie lifestyle, with protests about war and talk about revolution, wasn’t for Anderson, who was also very staunchly opposed to drug use, and in general found little common cause with the hippies, despite his bearded, long-haired, eccentric appearance." Andrew Hickey on the eccentric single that became Jethro Tull's biggest hit.
I thought I'd played chess for Northampton Working Men's Club (or Whyte Melville, as we were often called) only in the national club knock-out competition, which was a tournament to which Market Harborough did not aspire.
But, sorting out some old files, I found I had also played a season for them in the Northamptonshire league and done rather well too.
All of which makes more sense of this memory...
I was playing some five-minute games at Whyte Melville after winning my league game, and there was a beat-up old guy watching us. Even non-players are entranced by people playing blitz.
We got talking, and he asked me his favourite quiz question. What was the correct name of the Southern Lights? I knew the answer and he was suitably impressed.
And then he said something I've never forgotten:
"I've met men on the road who could tell you the name of every star in the sky."
It sounds like a tale from the pre-war days of tramps and tramping, but that is what he said.
I'm listening to an edition of Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud podcast in which he talks to the actor Samuel West. It was recorded a couple of weeks before the death of West's mother Prunella Scales and so far he has talked mostly about her and his late father, Timothy West.
But there is one story he has not told about his mother...
Vera Menchik was born in Moscow, to an English mother and Czech father, in 1906. She began playing chess competitively just before the family came to live in London in 1921.
She was to become the strongest woman chess player in the world, holding the women's world title between 1927 and 1944. She regularly competed, and with some success, against the top men players of her day. There was not another woman player who did that regularly until Judit Polgár in the 1990s.
Vera Menchik died in 1945 when her house in Clapham was hit by a German V1 flying bomb.
And what does all this have to do with Prunella Scales?
Vera Menchik's great grandfather was a man called George Illingworth. And his brother John Thomas Illingworth was the great grandfather of Prunella Scales. Which makes the two women third cousins.
Thanks to Richard James for putting me on to a thread on the English Chess Forum.
Here's another of the discursive Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Chess, cricket, Steve Winwood... it covers several topics dear to this blog's heart.
You can see Aksel Rykkvin as a treble above and as a baritone below.
Prodigious talent
Prodigies aren’t always popular with their elders. When Sir Martin Shee, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts, encountered the nine-year-old John Everett Millais in 1838, he suggested the boy should be sweeping chimneys rather than seeking to train as an artist.
And sometimes prodigious genius is misunderstood. At a very young age, my favourite musician, Steve Winwood, was turned away by the man round the corner who gave piano lessons. He found that if the boy heard a tune once he could play it from memory, so it was hard to convince him of the point of learning to read music.
Others were more appreciative. In 1959 his elder brother’s jazz group found themselves short of a pianist, so he brought Steve along:
"He was only 11, but he played everything perfectly. They stood with their mouths open. Because he was under age, we had to get him long trousers to make him look older, and even then we'd sneak him in through the pub kitchens. He'd play hidden behind the piano so nobody would know."
Soon after that Steve was jamming with newly arrived Jamaican musicians in his home city of Birmingham, and then backing some of the greats of American blues: Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim.
So by the time he joined the Spencer Davis Group at 15, and they had their first number one when he was 17, Winwood was an immensely experienced musician. Something to open the eyes of these new Beatles fans who are convinced there was nothing before the Fab Four and precious little else at the same time as them.
******
The youngest person to play first-class cricket in England was Barney Gibson, who kept wicket for Yorkshire against Durham MCC University in 2011 at the age of 15 years and 27 days. He was also on the books of Leeds United as a goalkeeper.
Most of us heard nothing more of him for a decade. Then an article appeared in a cricket magazine saying Gibson had “chosen enjoyment and freedom” and given up professional sport:
"It wasn’t until I got to the age of 18 that I asked myself: 'Is this what I’m going to be doing forever?'" Gibson recalls. "I think it was just a case of no longer enjoying what I used to wake up looking forward to doing every day."
I hope he is happy, whatever he is doing now.
******
I once attended the first London recital by an 18-year-old Norwegian baritone called Aksel Rykkvin. What was interesting about the event was that a few years before he had been the most celebrated boy treble in the world. For once the American term ‘boy soprano’ seemed justified.
It soon became clear that his wonderful clarity and instinctive understanding of the text had survived his change of voice unscathed. But not every prodigy is lucky or talented enough to pass through puberty with such grace.
Leaving aside the many chess talents lost to a discovery of sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll, a growth spurt can wreak havoc. The future England captain Nasser Hussain grew a foot in a single winter and found he could no longer pitch his leg breaks on a length:
"I went from bowling out Graham Gooch in the indoor school with everyone watching, to hitting the roof of the net or bowling triple-bouncers to deadly silence."
Hussain was able to reinvent himself as a batsman, but always said batting never felt as natural to him as spin bowling had.
And puberty is the great killer of child actors – boys at least. Either you lose your fetching looks and no one casts you, or you keep them and find you are still playing schoolboys when you are 20, with no one seeing you as a possible adult lead.
But maybe being a child actor isn’t much like being an adult actor. Take the case of William Betty, ‘the Young Roscius’, who enjoyed phenomenal success as a boy at the start of the 19th century. His appearance at the Covent Garden Theatre sparked extraordinary scenes:
Shrieks and screams of choking, trampled people were terrible. Fights for places grew; Constables were beaten back; the boxes were invaded. The heat was so fearful that men all but lifeless were lifted and dragged through the boxes into the lobbies which had windows.
Betty announced his retirement at the age of 17, only to spend the rest of his life making comebacks that failed to excite the public. Perhaps the great Sarah Siddons had him right: “My lord, he is a very clever, pretty boy but nothing more.”
******
If I didn’t love the music so much, I might agree there was something ridiculous about white, middle-class British boys playing the blues – “Can blue men play the whites/Or are they hypocrites?” as Viv Stanshall asked. But then I generally prefer to leave dreams of cultural purity to the right.
Besides, it’s widely claimed that the Spencer Davis Group had to film what we’d now call a video before their records could get played on white radio stations in the US. It had been widely assumed there, because of Steve Winwood’s vocals, that the band was black.
Eric Clapton had no doubts about Winwood’s authenticity. Here he his explaining his decision to switch to a Stratocaster guitar:
“Steve Winwood had so much credibility, and when he started playing one, I thought, oh, if he can do it, I can do it.”
Or as Clapton once put it more strongly:
“I’d always worshipped Steve, and whenever he made a move, I would be right on it. I gave great weight to his decisions because to me he was one of the few people in England who had his finger on some kind of universal musical pulse.”
Prodigious talent does encourage such reverence, though personally, when drawn against a chess prodigy, I found myself with a sneaking sympathy for Sir Martin Shee.
The chess world has been shocked by the death of the American grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky at the age of 29.
As well as being a strong player, Naroditsky was famous as a chess trainer and commentator. Chess experience a boom during Covid lockdown, and his videos, which were among the very best of their kind, must have played a part in this.
Many grandmasters don't understand how little the rest of us understand about the game, but Naroditsky was able to make things wonderfully clear.
In the video above, in which he beats a weaker player, he explains his moves as he goes along. And then he goes back over the game and the more general lessons to be learnt from it.
When I was a teenager, I used to borrow audio cassettes on the game – the nearest thing to this that was available between series of The Master Game.
On a happier note, the 10-year-old British prodigy Bodhana Sivanandan has beaten the former women's world champion (now ranked 13 in the world among women players) Mariya Muzychuk.
You can hear her analysing their game with wonderful maturity in the video below.
My memory of the Eighties is that Peter Wright was seen as being obsessive about Soviet infiltration of British intelligence. But didn't Karla arrange things to make Control look like that?
And in this programme from 1984 Wright cuts an impressive figure. No Percy Alleline he.
Let's end with a couple of pieces of trivia.
Malcolm Turnbull, the future Australian prime minister, who embarrassed the British government in court while fighting to allow Wright to publish his memoirs, is related to both Angela Lansbury and Oliver Postgate.
And Roger Hollis, whether he was a spy or not, was the father of Adrian Hollis, who was a correspondence chess grandmaster.
This is gold dust. James Burke interviews Bobby Fischer on the eve of his 1972 world championship match against Boris Spassky.
Despite the intermittent attempts to paint Fischer as an obsessed eccentric, he comes over as intelligent and personable. And of course he spent a lot of his time studying chess: it was his profession. Do we think top golfers are eccentric because they spend their time practising golf?
Fischer's confidence turned out to be justified, yet before this match he had never beaten Spassky. They had met four times, with two of the games being won by Spassky and two ending in draws.
Rishi Sunak established a £500,000 fund to support Britain's elite chess players when he was prime minister. The new Labour government scrapped it.
But now Rachel Reeves – a former British under-14 girls champion herself – has announced that a larger sum is earmarked for the same purpose.
Leonard Barden, in his Guardian column, quotes her as saying:
“We are allocating £1.5m to help identify, support and elevate top tier players who have the potential to compete at a global level.”
And he explains:
The new support, announced along with a £500m grant for youth service projects, is more precisely targeted to the best talents, and will act as a spur to players like England’s youngest grandmaster, Shreyas Royal, 16, and England’s youngest Olympiad player, Bodhana Sivanandan, 10, both of whom met the chancellor a few weeks ago at 11 Downing Street.
Currently the best prospect relative to age is Supratit Banerjee, 11, who played on top board for the Surrey team which retained the inter-counties championship this month and made a creditable draw with England’s No 2, David Howell, in a clock simultaneous match last week. The Scot, Frederick Gordon, 15, has also impressed.
Barden goes on to cite similar schemes that proved successful in England, the US and the old Soviet Union.
One feature of Rishi Sunak's package for chess isn't being revived: the money he gave for chess tables in parks.
It was always hard to see why this was a matter for central government, but the plan – like the teaching of Latin in state schools – was attacked out of both snobbery and inverse snobbery.
"Any real 'change' promised in Labour’s manifesto has been betrayed by a continuity with tired and damaging tropes of deserving and undeserving people. This is contributing to the sense, a year in, that this Labour government is merely repeating past government failures rather than striking out in a new direction." George Newth identifies the paradox at the heart of Keir Starmer's first year in power.
Aisha K. Gill sets out how we can make sure that the new grooming gangs inquiry is the last.
Andrea Pitzer on why we shouldn't talk about 'Alligator Alcatraz': "It’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed."
"While terms like 'gaslighting' have existed in therapeutic practice for decades or longer, most only started to become common lingo within the past few years, fuelled by use on social-media platforms. One viral Reddit post or TikTok video is all it takes for the masses to latch onto a previously overlooked word." Angela Haupt picks 10 such terms and explains their precise meaning, which can soon be lost when they escape the consulting room.
"Despite extensive state support for over-the board chess, the longed-for international ascendancy was never to return. Furthermore, no significant new talents emerged apart possibly from Klaus Junge; as Taylor Kingston shows, this contrasts tellingly with the Soviet Union whose policies quickly generated a massive growth in registered players, as well as world-beating players who would become dominant after the war." Tim-Jake Gluckman reviews a new book on chess in the Third Reich.
Dan Liebke considers the overlap between cricket and comic books, and asks if Ben Stokes is Alan Moore.
