By Hook Or By Rook

Chess fans wondering if Ronan Bennett was just dabbling in the dark arts of chess for the sake of some hoity-toity backdrop to ZUGZWANG can relax – according to a very nice piece over at Chess Base, the guy’s very serious about it all. Quoth Ronan:

“Chess was, to some degree, my saviour at a certain point in my life. I was on remand awaiting trial in Brixton prison in London. It was a tough prison and there were very few facilities. We were locked up for 23 hours a day. The boredom was excruciating. I read a lot, of course, but after a while, in those conditions, it was hard to enter the mental worlds the novels were trying to invite me into. The contradiction between my reality and the author’s imagined world was just too great. My lawyer was a Jewish man named Larry Grant, a keen amateur player and actually quite strong. Larry and I played a correspondence game, a King’s Gambit – he crushed me! But he gave me my first chess book – Irving Chernev’s THE MOST INSTRUCTIVE GAMES OF CHESS EVER PLAYED. Before that I didn’t realise that you could record the moves of games. From that moment on, chess captured me.”

So there it is, chess fans – hands up anyone else who can say chess kept them sane in prison. Hmmm, thought so … and no, Ludo doesn't count.