A first hand account of the strengths and weaknesses, of the genius and foibles, of the world's elite, graced by the most elegant prose, courtesy of Stahlberg, improved, if anything, by Harry Golombek's superb translation. The book is full of telling and memorable phrases.

A companion volume to Larry Evans's selection from the 1960's, this book takes the story of the best games of the top players from the beginnning of the 20th century up to 1940. This volume is arranged chronologically and reaches the period of the Second World War. The games by such immortals as Capablanca, Alekhine, Lasker, Botvinnik, Nimzowitsch and Rubinstein are annotated with the customary lucidity, authority and elegance synonymous with Golombek.

All too often chess openings books consist of reams of variations and sub-variations and bracketed sub-sub-variations, with no apparent explanation for why a move is chosen or why one path deserves precedence over another. Golombek fought tenaciously against this denigration of his art, for he considered chess an art form. The Grandmaster Emeritus always sought to explain the ideas behind the moves and give the strategic justification for any course of action. For this reason alone Golombek's chief openings manual, reprinted here, will outlive the ephemera which largely characterise rival...

Richard Reti (1889-1929) was both a master player and a superb endgame composer. He was also a prominent member of the hyper-modern school and author of two of the greatest chess books ever written, Masters of the Chessboard and Modern Ideas in Chess. His games, which greatly influenced chess strat egy, are known for their many innovations, beautifully developed combinations, and important advances in opening play and strategy. There are 70 games in this book, selected from all stages of Reti's career. Early games show the budding of Reti's almost phenomenal positional skills and his rise to...

Morphy, Charousek, Pillsbury, Fischer... the history of chess is illuminated by shooting stars who burn briefly across the chess firmament, only to vanish without trace. The parabolic career of the Latvian genius Mikhail Tal conforms all too well to this astonishing pattern. As a virtually unknown student in 1957 Tal swept aside the revered phalanxes of Soviet Grandmasters and ultimately annihilated the Red Czar of Soviet chess himself - Mikhail Botvinnik - all within a mere three year period.