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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

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

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

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

I am sitting in a homely pizzeria in Jokkmokk, a Swedish town tucked just north of the Arctic Circle, talking to Anders Sunna, a Sámi artist whose small studio is a couple of blocks away. The Sámis are the indigenous people of the far north of the Scandinavian peninsula, whose presence also stretches into north-western

Microsoft has escaped the recent backlash against the power and wealth of the biggest US tech companies. Despite a stock market value that has soared to more than $2tn on its dominance of various parts of the business software market, it has avoided a repeat of the complaints that made it the most prominent target

Oleg Bril’s high-rise apartment block in Chernihiv was ripped apart by a rocket fired by Russian troops last month. Looking up at its remains, Bril still wonders why they did it. “I have no explanation. There are no military units here,” he said. “There are only civilians, and across the street a cardiology hospital and