Fifty Shades of Ray

Chess in the year of the Coronavirus Pandemic
Fifty of Ray Keene's columns written for The Article and The British Chess Magazine, in which his primary aim has been to connect chess to wider political, scientific and cultural concerns.
Inspired by both Daniel Defoe's 'A Journal of the Plague Year' (1722) and 'The King', an anthology of the witty and provocative chess columns of the Dutch Grandmaster, Jan Hein Donner, Ray Keene here collects his thoughts and writings on the year 2020 - both in chess and the wider world. His reflections include the impact of Covid-19 on the popularity of chess, the remarkable influence of the Netflix series 'The Queen's Gambit', the growing army of teenage Grandmasters, the online pivot of chess competition and the emergence of chess entrepreneurs, such as World Champion Magnus Carlsen and Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. Like Donner, Ray uses chess as a metaphor for observations on art, culture and civilisation.

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