Tapestry of Spies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank those who gave so generously of their time and their imaginations. First, thanks to Ernie Erber, who actually spent part of 1936 in Barcelona. Thanks to Mike Hill and Joe Fanzone for valuable early consultations; they see their ideas reflected on every page of the book. Thanks to Fred Rasmussen, of The Sun library, for digging out the Spanish Civil War photos that were of so much help; Antero Pietila of The Sun’s Moscow bureau, for unearthing the location, size, and architecture of the Hotel Lux; to another colleague, Matt Sieden, for his kind words and good suggestions. Thanks to my old college roommate, Lenne Miller, for his enthusiasms for the book. Thanks to my mother, Virginia Hunter, and my brother, Tim Hunter, for their comments and patience; and to my brother-in-law, medical consultant, and good friend, John D. Bullock, M.D. Thanks to David Petzal for his reading. Thanks to the night-shift concierge at the Hotel Colón in Barcelona for numerous courtesies and unfailing good humor. Thanks to Jeff Bass, for suggesting the epigram from the Mason book. And to Susan Carnochan and Zita Dabars, for assistance with my Spanish. Thanks especially to my courageous and stubborn agent, Victoria Gould Pryor, who believed in this book from the very start and fought for it as if it were her own; and to my brilliant editor, Barbara Grossman, of Crown, for her quotient of belief and her refusal to accept anything less than my best. And thanks ― special thanks ― to my wife, Lucy Hageman Hunter, for her glamourless, thankless, and yet heroic efforts on behalf of this book. Needless to say, errors are entirely my own.

The Ruy-Lopez is more popular than any other king pawn opening…. The Gambit is astonishingly complicated, embodying as it does a perpetual intertwining of grandiose strategical planning with an alarming maze of difficult tactical finesses and combinative motifs. It is no exaggeration to affirm that mastery of the Spanish Gambit is a requisite for anyone aspiring to become a strong chess player.

Adapted from James Mason,

The Art of Chess,

London, April 1898