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Half a century ago, Bobby Fischer captured Boris Spassky’s world title in Reykjavik and sparked a global chess boom. A galaxy of English talent, led by Nigel Short and Michael Adams, surged to No 2 behind the former Soviet Union. England’s Fischer generation are now in their fifties and sixties, while Adams, 50, leads a

Cyber warfare follows on the heels of conventional weaponry, a fact not lost on Ukraine’s neighbouring governments and corporates. Globally, more is being spent on cyber security, according to an update from Darktrace on Wednesday. Yet investors marked its shares down 10 per cent. This is at odds with the way Moscow’s invasion of Kyiv

More than 250 people have been killed in severe flooding in South Africa, officials said on Wednesday, a day after heavy rains swept away roads and houses and disrupted shipping from the continent’s biggest port. The death toll in the floods in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa’s second-most populous province, makes it one of the worst

Private equity billionaire and co-owner of the Boston Celtics basketball team Stephen Pagliuca has revealed that Larry Tanenbaum, chair of the National Basketball Association, is among the list of heavyweight backers of his bid to buy Chelsea. The consortium led by the co-chair of Bain Capital, a US private equity firm with $160bn of assets

One oddity of the Ukrainian war has been watching far-right leaders such as Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage scramble back from their adoration of Vladimir Putin, while their far-left peers tone down the excoriations of Nato. It must have felt similar watching Hitler’s appeasers reinvent themselves in autumn 1939. Today’s far right

In a mountainous part of central Bosnia-Herzegovina, the town of Konjic has a long history of decorative woodcarving. “At one point there were 36 woodcarving workshops,” says Orhan Niksic, a former senior economist with the World Bank, whose great-grandfather founded a workshop in Konjic in the late 1800s. “By 2014, we were the only ones

American Vintage wool hoodie, €195. Prada wool trousers, £1,400, and jacquard knitted shorts, £1,250. Comme des Garçons Play x Converse cotton Chuck ’70 sneakers, £130. Neckpiece, stylist’s own Furniture throughout, Memphis Milano. Ettore Sottsass metal Treetops floor lamp, 1981, €2,590 Hermès perforated technical-cotton canvas Quadrige shirt, €1,530. Isabel Marant cotton Carello trousers, £325. Edhèn raffia and brass Brera shoes, €450. Etro leather and cabochon-stone

Ukraine’s finance minister recently sent out an SOS to the west asking for emergency funding. The Institute of International Finance has had a stab at estimating just how bad the situation is. Its economists stress that there is obviously “an extraordinary level of uncertainty”, with the brutal war still ongoing, but reckon that Ukraine’s gross

British travellers have been warned to expect extensive delays this Easter as staff shortages, engineering work and seized ferries affect the industry just as demand for holidays soars. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said on Wednesday that he expected this weekend to be “extremely busy” as people take advantage of relaxed Covid travel restrictions to

Every novelist is in the business of managing cliché and the unreal. The first is necessary for a work to have some degree of universal appeal, the second because fiction is never a strictly documentary art. Realism itself is a way of managing invention, of deviating from and shaping real materials in the service of

At first, I assumed that the senior investment banker I was meeting for lunch at his posh private members’ club in Mayfair was joking. “There are no chief executives in Germany,” quipped the specialist in merger and acquisitions advisory. I wondered if he was referring to the fact that the current crop of German chief

Please don’t tell anyone what happened today lads x. That’s among the standout lines in chat logs released on Tuesday as part of litigation against UK traders accused of engineering an oil futures crash. A class-action lawsuit filed by rare coin shop Mish International Monetary alleges that traders associated with Vega Capital London made out

A full EU embargo on Russian energy would trigger a major recession in Germany, sending output down 2.2 per cent next year and wiping out more than 400,000 jobs, according to the country’s top economic institutes. The new forecast released on Wednesday was more pessimistic than most earlier economic studies and could give cover for

Delta Air Lines’ chief executive said the carrier has sold a record number of tickets in the past five weeks as customers set aside their concerns about inflation to splurge on air travel. “We’ve . . . sold more tickets, in that time, than any period in public history,” Ed Bastian told the Financial Times in an interview. “We’re

Sometimes you come across a recipe or the story of a dish that strikes a chord. It could be something you tear out of a magazine or a screengrab on your phone that sets off a journey which concludes only when that dish is on your table. For us, Rosie Sykes’ The Sunday Night Book

Tesco lifted profits last year but the UK’s biggest supermarket group has warned earnings will suffer this year as it prioritises price competitiveness in the face of soaring costs and a vicious squeeze on household incomes. Chief executive Ken Murphy said on Wednesday that while the full impact of rising inflation was yet to be

James Bullard, president of the St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve, has warned it is a “fantasy” to think the US central bank can bring down inflation sufficiently without raising interest rates to a level where they constrain the economy. Bullard, a voting member of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee and one of

P&O Ferries has suffered a setback in its efforts to return to full operations after maritime inspectors detained the Spirit of Britain, the second of two ferries on its Dover-Calais route to be barred from sailing. The UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency said the vessel was held because surveyors identified “a number of deficiencies” that

The activist shareholder which called in January for Peloton to fire co-founder John Foley has taken aim at its new chief executive, arguing that Barry McCarthyhas failed to reform the connected-fitness company’s governance or justify its continued independence. Blackwells Capital, which has a stake of almost 5 per cent, plans to set out its argument

Stockpiles of some of the world’s most important industrial metals have dropped to critically low levels as record power prices in Europe hit production and the war in Ukraine threatens output from Russia. Inventories of aluminium, copper, nickel and zinc — four of the main contracts traded on the London Metal Exchange — have plunged

The 47th Old Vic, London What wouldn’t we give to have Shakespeare’s voice on the seismic power struggles currently playing out on the national and international stage? His absence is key to Mike Bartlett’s bold, witty new drama, The 47th, which playfully echoes many of the playwright’s great works as it measures up to this