| Chess One 2005-05-31, 8:31 pm |
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<parrthenon@cs.com> wrote in message
news:1117512720.435576.197960@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
quote:
> STOP WHINING, MR. KINGSTON
quote:
> The two men approached the subject from divergent paths. Mr.
> Kingston's fault was not to research his main path more carefully by
> moving beyond a few printed sources. GM Evans' fault was to forget a
> discrete fact about a matter that was not central to his theme.
>
> Mr. Kingston would do well to expect more of himself rather than
> to continue whining and offering excuses for a shortcoming that he
> evinced -- a shortcoming that prevented a decent piece of work from
> being much better.
This is a human appreciation of the dispute, but will it appease the Rage of
the Librarians?
The fault of any history or biography is usually either an insufficient
appreciation of individual factors against a background context, or lack of
comparison with other individuals at the time.
May we all learn something from this dialogue. What would be an
objectionable result would be to make conclusions concerning Keres/Botvinnik
from the clerical-stance of only noting who said what in their respective
columns, as represented here in these threads. This latter approach suits
only librarians and bean counters, incurious of how many beans there are to
count, and if they are of differing qualities.
It seems to me that Larry Parr has recognised the truth of this in his
perspective above. If we were all in accord with it perhaps we could move on
and allow ourselves to write better chess histories and biographies.
Phil Innes
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