Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. In 1972, the world was gripped by one of the great battles of the Cold War.

It was fought in Iceland, and it was a chess match,

one between the American Bobby Fisher and the Russian Boris Spaski.

I'm not going to stay up nights worrying, it's going to be over, you know, pretty serious.

In this little thing with me in Spaski is sort of a microcosm of the whole world political situation.

You know, you know, you always read about it.

They suggest the two world leaders sort of fight it out hand in hand if and this is kind of that kind of thing now.

At the time, Fisher declared chess is war on a board,

and at that moment in history it certainly seemed like it.

But then it always has.

If all games are to some degree a surrogate for violence and

war, no game so closely compares to a set-piece battle as chess. Two opposing

armies line up to march across the board, foot soldier pawns in front, officers behind.

Every chess set shows a society at war.

Whether that society is Indian, Middle Eastern or European, the way the pieces are

named and shaped tells us a great deal about how that society functions.

So if we want to visualize European society around the year 1200, we could hardly do better

than look at how they played chess. And no chess pieces offer richer insights than the 78 mixed pieces found on the Hebrideen Island of Lewis in 1831 and known ever since as the

Lewis Chessman.

67 are in the British Museum, 11 are owned by the National Museums of Scotland.

Between them, these much-loved pieces take us into the heart of the medieval world.

I was trying to define what chess is and I asked Tony Miles, Grandmaster, and he said,

...