Throughout history great men have felt an irresistible attraction to chess – Lenin, Einstein and the financier Rothschild to name but a few.

In his priestlike devotion to the playing of chess Fischer seemed the supreme embodiment of this movement. Chess evolution had produced the absolute chessplayer, made for chess and nothing else.

Fischer’s games paradoxically answer perennial questions as to the precise essence of chess. His play created the impression that chess is a homogenous unity combining all prime factors, any one of which could unilaterally predominate in the games of less talented masters.

Fischer was one of the few players of whom it could be said that virtually every game in which he was involved was worthy of publication and full of interest. It would be no idle claim that his games combined the scientific logic of Botvinnik with the fierce hunting instinct of Alekhine or Lasker and the lucid, effortless beauty achieved by Capablanca.

The charge has been levelled against the purity of the style of Fischer that he was primarily a theoretical materialist. Evidence for this lies in his predilection for the sharp “Poisoned Pawn” variation of the Najdorf Sicilian. Yet the pioneering spirit of adventure with which Fischer conducted his games demonstrate that his materialism is the positive “heroic materialism” diagnosed by Sir Kenneth Clarke in his History of Civilisation.

Off the chessboard Fischer was also accused of materialism, but this too is unfounded because his efforts were confined to obtaining, for the World Chess Champion, the kind of fees commanded by artists of similar standing.