Mir Sultan Khan

Mir Sultan Khan was the first grandmaster strength chess player ever from Asia, yet his origins were humble and he worked as a man-servant for an Indian businessman, from what is now Pakistan. When his master brought him to England, Sultan Khan took the world of chess by storm, defeating Capablanca who was considered unbeatable and willing the British Championship four times. Sultan Khan is now regarded as having been the 6th or 7th strongest player in the world. When his master went back to India, he took Sultan Khan with him and Sultan Khan was never seen by the world of chess again. This book unravels the mystery of what ever happened to Sultan Khan.

The books of Richard Nevile Cole are marvelous of clarity of analysis and hard work on the board, despite Coles being just a Club Player. R. N. Coles was born on 20 September 1907 in St. Mark, Surbiton, Surrey, England. His father was Richard James Coles. His mother was Dorothy Jane. Richard Nevil Coles was the eldest of four sons of a civil servant. He was educated at Gate House School, Kingston. Russell School and Trinity College Cambridge, where he obtained a B.A. in Classics. After leaving University, he took employment with Sun Life of Canada as an actuary, and played for the Insurance Chess Club from 1930. In 1940 he enlisted in the Queen's Royal Regiment, later converted to the 99th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. He was commissioned, serving in Britain until 1942 and thereafter in Bombay, Israel and Egypt. After obtaining his discharge at the end of the war he returned to Sun Life of Canada as an agent. In January 1944 he began in the British Chess Magazine a series of monthly articles entitled “One Hundred Years Ago”, which ran for thirty-seven years. During these next decades Nevil Coles also produced a number of outstanding chess books, beginning with Battles Royal of the Chessboard (1948). Having become a specialist in chess biography, he brought out studies of H.E. Atkins (1952) Mir Sultan Khan (1965 with an enlarged edition in 1977) and Howard Staunton (1975). this last work being written in collaboration with Raymond Keene. He also contributed the chapter on Staunton for World Chess Champions (1981). During his last years he published a number of biographical articles in British Chess Magazine on Burn (1977 and 1978) Rubinstein (I960), Schlechter (1980), Maroczy (1981) and Colle (1981), It is generally acknowledged that R.H. Coles' finest work was Dynamic Chess (1956, with a revised and expanded German version in 1963), This is a most profound, vet clearly written, expose of the development of chess strafes from the Classical School, through the Hypermodern Revolution to the Dynamic Era, and it received the highest plaudits from connoisseurs of chess literature. R,N. Coles died on 2nd April 1982, at the age of seventy- four, as the result of an accident. His favorite journal, the British Chess Magazine, paid him a worthy tribute in its August 1982 edition with the publication of a fine appreciation and memoir by his colleague Raymond Keene.