Howell Wins British Chess Championship at 18

Leonard Barden
Saturday August 8 2009
The Guardian
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David Howell, 18, triumphed with an unbeaten 9/11, seven wins and four draws, in the British Championship at Torquay. The teenager from East Sussex is already the youngest ever UK grandmaster and is now the second youngest British champion after Michael Adams, who won the title at 17.

Howell rode his luck in some games, notably in round two when Mark Hebden missed an instant win, but overall his total was an impressive performance which suggests he can improve to join Adams and Nigel Short at the top of the game.

Howell first hit the headlines at the age of eight when he beat the grandmaster John Nunn in a speed game, a world age record. At nine, he became the youngest to qualify for the British Championship final tournament and three years later, he drew a speed game against the then world champion Vladimir Kramnik. He took his A levels early and has improved rapidly for the past year. In 2008 he was beaten in the final round of the world junior (U20) championship and he will try again for the title at Mar del Plata, Argentina, in October.

Today, Howell joins England's optimum team, led by Adams and Short, for a 10-round match against the Netherlands at Simpsons in the Strand, London. Play is every afternoon until 17 August and spectators can watch for free. The legendary Viktor Korchnoi, 78, competes in an individual event.

Below the game was complex but level until Black blundered by 21...Rd8? (Bb5+ 22 c4 Bc6) and had to resign three moves later faced with heavy material loss.

D Howell v R Palliser

1 d4 Nf6 2 Bg5 d5 3 Bxf6 gxf6 4 e3 c5 5 dxc5 e6 6 Nd2 Bxc5 7 g3 Nc6 8 Ne2 d4 9 exd4 Qd5 10 dxc5 Qxh1 11 Nc3 Qxh2 12 Nde4 O-O 13 Qd2 Rd8 14 Nxf6+ Kh8 15 Qg5 h6 16 Qg4 Qh1 17 Rd1 Rxd1+ 18 Nxd1 Bd7 19 Ne3 Ne5 20 Qf4 Nf3+ 21 Ke2 Rd8? 22 Bg2 Ng1+ 23 Kf1 Qh2 24 Nfg4 1-0

Lower down the table the rising Durham expert Jonathan Hawkins, 26, scored an IM result as he did in 2008. Here his sharp 12 Kf1 varies from 12 Bd2. Black should have tried 15...Bxd4 16 Nxd4 Nxd4 when the N stops the deadly Qf3. Black's Rd7? fell for mate when 19...Rf8 20 Bh6 Bd7 held out longer.

J Hawkins v S Sen

1 d4 Nf6 2 c4 g6 3 Nc3 d5 4 cxd5 Nxd5 5 e4 Nxc3 6 bxc3 Bg7 7 Bc4 c5 8 Be3 O-O 9 Ne2 Nc6 10 Rc1 cxd4 11 cxd4 Qa5+ 12 Kf1!? Qa3 13 Rc3 Qd6 14 h4 Rd8 15 h5 Nxd4? 16 Nxd4 Bxd4 17 hxg6 hxg6 18 Rd3 e5 19 Qf3 Rd7? 20 Bg5 Kg7 21 Qh3 1-0

3099 1...Rf4! 2 Rxc7 Qh6! and White resigned due to 3 Rxd7 Rh4 and Rxh2+.

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guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Paul Morphy, Chess Player, World Champion!

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Iran arrests 'Agatha Christie' female serial killer!

Robert Tait
Friday May 22 2009
The Guardian
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Police in Iran believe they have caught the country's first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie.

The 32-year-old suspect, named only as Mahin, stands accused of killing at least six people, including five women, according to officials in the city of Qazvin, about 100 miles north-west of Tehran.

"Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself," Mohammad Baqer Olfat, the Qazvin prosecutor, told Iranian journalists.

Mahin, who it is claimed also admitted the earlier murders of her former landlord and an aunt, is said to have carefully chosen her victims, targeting elderly and middle-aged women and offering them lifts home after picking them up at shrines in the city where they had been praying.

Police said she confessed in custody to killing four such women in Qazvin since January, claiming to have been driven by a desperate need for money after chalking up debts of more than ?16,000. After offering her victims a lift, Mahin allegedly gave them fruit juice which she had spiked with an anaesthetic to knock them out. She would then suffocate them before stealing their jewellery and other possessions and dumping the bodies in secluded spots. One victim was beaten to death with an iron bar after regaining consciousness.

Which Christie novels Mahin studied has not yet been revealed, though many of the books describe killers using drugs. Christie's novels, some of which depict unsolved murders, are highly popular among Iranians. The writer, who died in 1976, visited Iran several times and used it as the setting for one of her stories, The House at Shiraz.

Qazvin's police chief, Ali Akbar Hedayati, said Mahin was afflicted by a mental disorder triggered by having been deprived of her mother's love. She would draw her chosen victims into conversation by telling them they reminded her of her mother, the police chief said.

After apparently being so careful to stay ahead of the police, it seems that the most mundane of transgressions, a road traffic offence, alerted detectives and led to her arrest.

Officers first suspected the killer may have been a woman after studying a footprint found near one of the bodies. They were only led to Mahin after a 60-year-old woman, having read about the murders, told them she had escaped from a light-coloured Renault car after becoming suspicious of the female driver.

After checking cars matching that description, their attention was drawn to Mahin by records showing she had been fined following a recent road accident.

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guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Why chess is a perfect game for fiction - KGB chess!

Stuart Evers
Friday August 28 2009
The Guardian
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The summer of 1972 is a golden one for writers seeking a tumultuous background to their fiction. Kicking off with the breaking of the Watergate scandal, continuing through "Hanoi" Jane Fonda's tour of North Vietnam and ending with the massacre at the Munich Olympics, that summer is stuffed with so many huge international events that a humble game of chess seems rather a distraction. But this was the match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer - and the whole of the cold war world was watching.

The central character in David Szalay's second novel, The Innocent, however, has to content himself with listening on the radio. A former hardliner and former member of the nascent KGB, Aleksandr sets up his battered and broken chess set and moves his little chess pieces according to the increasingly tired voice calling the action from Reykjavik. It's just four pages long, this scene, but Szalay imbues it with a stillness and a tension that is taut and increasingly expressive.

The broken board, the chessmen wrapped in a newspaper reporting a decade-old east v west crisis, the frown on Aleksandr's face as he fails to spot Fischer's error: all of these images, when taken together, perfectly articulate the internal combat waging in Aleksandr's head. His faith in the great experiment is failing, yet chess is there to remind him where his allegiance lies. The section ends with a simple, yet effective, conclusion: Aleksandr is looking at the board, staring at the "silent little pieces of wood whose significant positions are tonight transfixing the world."

Even without the backdrop of political schisms and the spectre of mutually assured destruction, chess is a transfixing game in its own right - especially for writers. It has been the inspiration for countless novels, plays and pieces of short fiction, many of which are collected in a wonderful anthology called The 64-Square Looking Glass. What is it that makes chess such a consistently fascinating subject?

Chess, by its very nature, is a battle between two different thought processes; it gives the novelist the opportunity to go into the players' minds, while retaining an element of plot at the same time. This approach is brilliantly explored in Carl Haffner's Love of the Draw by Thomas Glavnic, a novel as strikingly good as its title. Here, 10 games of chess - which become ever more gripping as Haffner tries desperately to avoid losing - are the springboard to a familial history and an elegy for a disappearing Vienna. It's one of chess's finest novels, sitting comfortably alongside Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense and Paulo Maurensig's The Lüneburg Variation.

More abstractly, chess is attractive to writers as it mirrors the very act of writing itself. Planning ahead, tactics, manipulation are both part of fiction's palate as well as chess's. In both his fiction and his plays, Beckett used the imagery of the chess set, moving his characters around like lowly, articulate pawns. The conclusion of Murphy may be the finest expression of the game's intrinsic link to both art and humanity - "The ingenuity of despair" indeed.

Taking Beckett to its postmodern conclusion, Martin Amis's Money featured a chess game between the central character, the plumply odious John Self, and the spitty, roll-up smoking "Martin Amis". It's an extraordinary scene and one that despite my general loathing of his style and subject matter, I must concede is brilliantly written, controlled and executed. It's the only time where I could see what the fuss was all about, especially at the game's close when "Amis" apologises, as much for creating him as for beating Self at the board.

While Szalay's novel is far from the glitzy literary chicanery of Amis, The Innocent does, like Money, pivot around its respective chess scene. And while Self is playing his creator, Aleksandr is playing out other people's moves as well as his own personal demons. Neither are chess men, yet this is the game they play - for no other has the weight and heft to support such an important part of a novel.

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guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

The Murderess and the Hangman - will she escape the hangman?

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Chess and the KGB novel - "an exciting and memorable read"!

Viv Groskop
Sunday August 23 2009
The Observer
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Spring 1948 and Aleksandr, a KGB major, is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Urals to investigate Anatoly Yudin. A famous pianist in the 1930s, Yudin disappeared during the Second World War and was presumed dead. Now he has resurfaced and has a strange form of amnesia. Or does he? Aleksandr suspects Yudin may be writing anti-Soviet tracts. Does Lozovsky, Yudin's doctor, know something? The story is told by Aleksandr, looking back from 1972 as he begins to see the whole of Soviet history - and the role he has himself played - in a different light.

With Aleksandr, David Szalay, winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2008 for his debut London and the South-East, has created an extraordinary character, a KGB man you can imagine knowing or even being. Aleksandr is an idealist, a "real" communist, who truly believes in the system and wants to do the right thing. Anyone who has seen the German film The Lives of Others will recognise the type: he's a cousin of Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, another Everyman who suddenly finds himself questioning everything he has ever believed.

This, then, is a similar situation in Soviet form. Szalay's trick is to make us feel for Aleksandr and sympathise with his dilemmas, while inserting the odd chilling clue as to what's really going on. ("Turn off his light," he says to the officer guarding a man under interrogation and we suddenly realise the conditions the prisoner has been kept in.) Aleksandr's journalist brother, Ivan, offers a foil to the ideological purity; he is prepared to take risks and sees the flaws in the system ? until he becomes a beneficiary of it himself. Over the course of the book, the two brothers swap roles, with Aleksandr becoming more disillusioned and Ivan happily riding the gravy train.

The novel's focus swings dramatically between the two brothers' changing relationship and the fate of Yudin and Lozovsky, until we, like Aleksandr, are no longer sure who's in the right, who is supposedly guilty and who really has done something wrong. The result is not so much a critique of the Soviet system - or of totalitarianism - as a comment on the uncertainty of life, how little we know others or even ourselves.

Woven into the narrative are fascinating accounts of historical moments, seen through the eyes of ordinary Soviets, which gradually affect Aleksandr's mindset: losing to the Germans 3-0 at football in the 1972 European Championship final; Bobby Fischer beating Boris Spassky at the Reykjavik chess championships. When Aleksandr's KGB mentor, a man whom he considers to be as trustworthy and "pure" as himself, is targeted, his world implodes. Meanwhile, there are scenes of quiet, comic desperation from everyday Soviet life. The KGB officer supposed to be intercepting Lozovsky falls asleep at his post. In a communal flat, people find themselves involuntarily registering what their neighbours last had to eat and when they last smoked a cigarette.

This is an exciting and memorable read. Expertly researched, it feels authentic, but wears its learning reassuringly lightly. Anyone who appreciated Martin Amis's Koba the Dread and Orlando Figes's The Whisperers will love it, as will fans of The Lives of Others or Burnt by the Sun. As with both films, the theme of silent, regret-filled horror is beautifully, chillingly captured.

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guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Kate Webster - London murderess! - did she do it?

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How to Write a Novel - Arts Council UK

The question of how to receive an Arts Council Grant in the UK is one writers (in the UK at least) think about often. The following link, niftily entitled "Show Me The Money," is a useful posting by the writer Tom Vowler about how to get these Arts Council Awards. I am currently taking Tom's advice and I will find out in about 1-2 months whether my application has been successful. The recipe for success, in Tom's eyes, is to essentially demonstrate that writing is not an entirely solitary pursuit, that a point does come when you reach out to the community, and the earlier the better. Hence Tom's blog, which receives a decent readership (one marker of which is that most of his posts receive comments). In addition, the Arts Council itself points out that a high number of applicants (40-50%) do achieve these Awards, even if a high percentage are also rejected. I would add that applying for an Arts Council Grant - money that is essentially awarded to the UK Arts Council to regional offices around the country - is sourced from the UK Lottery. No irony intended. But even if these Grants are hard to attain, you can definitely improve your chances by being in contact with your regional "assessor," by demonstrating a track record of community action - readings at local bookshops or community centers, or God forbid, writing a blog on the subject of writing. It all adds up.

If you're successful, you get to wear this logo on your promotional material, website, as a header or sidebar on your blog. Good luck!

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