Ray Keene OBE

Smoke and Drinkers

Great minds rarely conform. The golden age of chess produced champions whose brilliance was matched only by their colourful eccentricities.

Milton’s Cosmic Game of Chess

Some games determine kingdoms. Milton imagined one that determined the destiny of mankind.

Brave New Game

Every generation believes it has discovered a better way to improve humanity. Inevitably, it begins by rewriting the rules.

The Art of the Draw

Not every deadlock is a stalemate, and not every defeat is a checkmate. Chess teaches us the difference.

The Obliteration of Memory

Empires are conquered twice: first by armies, and then by the erasure of memory.

Virgil’s wrong door - this way to the egress

The greatest literary mysteries are not always hidden in forgotten manuscripts. Sometimes they have been lying in plain sight for two thousand…

Raymond Keene Interviews Professor Tony Buzan

Every complex machine comes with an instruction manual. Tony Buzan spent a lifetime asking why the most remarkable machine of all -…

Survival of the Fattest

From Darwin to Nietzsche, from giraffes to grandmasters, the battle for survival has shaped far more than the natural world.

On the Shoulders of Dwarves

The greatest discoveries are often made not by choosing between science and the humanities, but by refusing to recognise the divide.

Go and the Atomic Bomb

As Hiroshima vanished in the first atomic explosion of war, two Go masters calmly reset their scattered stones and continued their game.

Draughts, also known as Checkers

Before computers conquered chess, one extraordinary mathematician proved that human intuition could still outthink silicon.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, German intellectuals and the First World War

Conan Doyle's attitude to war seems, from the tenor of this passage, to be one of stoic acceptance, rather than enthusiastic celebration.

How a mediaeval thinker out of the box: Stupor Mundi, helped me to solve a Chinese puzzle

Inspiration often comes from unlikely sources.