A warning runs through David Shenk’s slim history of chess. “Think of a virus,” he writes, “so advanced, it infects not the blood but the thoughts of its human host.” Those who have read Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction or followed the life of Bobby Fischer know how the chessboard can turn the obsessive genius’s brain on himself.

Chess players proceed upon anticipating countermoves and, driven exclusively to thinking their game, they begin to deploy the best of their intelligence into plotting against themselves, bringing on paranoia. But it is this very danger of the chessboard to link up with human thought that makes this social history of the game so compelling. As Shenk subtitles his book, “Or how 32 carved pieces on a board illuminated our understanding of war, art, science, and the human brain”.

Shenk starts with a founding myth in ancient India. A monarch asked his sage for a game which would embrace free will and intelligence. Chess was his reward. It was a vehicle for abstract ideas, like infinity and zero. As the game travelled, in newly Islamised Middle East it was adopted as an icon for the acquisition of knowledge. In medieval Europe, this assemblage of war-like figures became a mirror for individuals to understand their roles in society. Chess was also, amazingly, adopted in romantic poetry, to “articulate the new ideal of overt intimacy (amidst) other social obligations”.

Interleaved with the evolution of the game are paces of the “immortal game”, a casual match between two math professors in a London tavern in 1851. Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky could not have known as they practised for a major tournament that their game would be memorised centuries later—that it would inspire a film (Blade Runner), a re-enactment every year with live players in an Italian town, and a postage stamp in Surinam. Shenk’s narrative is compelling enough but Anderssen’s swashbuckling gambits give the book pace, and as the pages turn, the chessboard becomes the dominant reality.

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