With each success the ability to change is reduced. My longtime friend and coach Grandmaster Yuri Dokhoian, aptly compared it to being dipped in bronze. Each victory added another coat.

I would like to travel to my country again, to a country without a dictatorship, to a post-Putin Russia.

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

So many dictators trying to blackmail the free world because they have no way to compete on ideas, innovation or creativity. The Cold War was two competing visions of the future. I was always anti-communist but it was an idea at least, an alternative idea. We do not have a competing vision for the future because the ideals of these dictators are in the past. They are time travellers. They need confrontation and destruction to survive. The problem is, many people in the free world are sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

All that now seems to stand between Nigel and the prospect of the world crown is the unfortunate fact that fate brought him into this world only two years after Kasparov.