On and off the chessboard, the ex-world champion is a fighter. Now the man who has led the struggle for Russian democracy talks to Standpoint

The EU is in decline, but with a pragmatic approach it can reshape itself on the Anglo-Saxon model

'The Tajiks are unnervingly friendly. They take the Islamic injunction of hospitality with grave seriousness. The hungry often sacrifice their only cow for a backpacker with a camera, and the regime has liberally welcomed boots and bases on its soil.'

'Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin's 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution.'