"Nigel was nowhere in sight. Obviously it would have been interesting to hear what he had to say. I was not sure what his actual reason was. But, in any event, it was useless to argue. We had made an agreement in Reston that if we ever ran into problems, we should sit down and talk about them. Instead, as I learned later, Nigel had followed the biblical admonition that "the guilty flee where no man pursueth" and hid out on Dominic Lawson's sofa. To play really safe, he should have been under it.

"In Dominic Lawson's book on the match he writes that when he asked Rea why they did not talk about the problems with me, she said: "I am going to be all sweetness and light, the model of hypocrisy. He will not know what I am thinking. But when the time comes, I will act. And so will Nigel." Obviously, under these circumstances, a working relationship was no longer possible.

"The fight through the final of the World Championship has brought out a sense of purpose in Nigel Short which was previously lacking. He concentrated all his efforts on the Candidates matches, preparing with a thoroughness which is perhaps customary in Eastern Europe, but is unknown to most other English chess professionals.

"A good example of his change in approach is his play in the opening. Whereas a few years ago his main aim in this phase of the game would have been to avoid a theoretical struggle, he now actively courts one."

This is contradicted by what Karpov wrote in his autobiography, Karpov on Karpov (and quoted in Russians vs Fischer):

"Then suddenly - imagine - I received an invitation to attend the Spassky training session... This was an honour. True, my star too was rising swiftly, my name already carried considerable weight, and I had received my share of support. But all this was new to me, and the backstage preparations for a world title match seemed to me something like a secret altar. To be there, to peer into this holy of holies was something I could not have imagined a mere year earlier... And so I went to the Spassky session.

"Of course I was not allowed anywhere near the holy of holies. I was considered a chance person and potentially dangerous. Therefore I was only occasionally invited to take part in some trite and non-essential analysis of one of Fischer's games.

"I was amazed to see Spassky doing nothing.

"Usually the morning would begin with him enthusiastically recounting, over breakfast, another episeode from the Greek myths, which he loved dearly and read before going to bed. Then there would be tennis. Then something else. Anything except chess. At the time he was expounding the 'theory' of a clear head. With a clear head and refreshed, he would, with his talent, outplay anyone. This theory had been invented by his coach Bondarevsky so as somehow to justify the World Champion's pathological laziness. Although I too consider myself lazy, Spassky's laziness astonished me. I was certainly not impressed by the fact that he had been able to win his match with Petrosian after such 'preparation.' With all due credit to Petrosian, I felt even then that the experience of the match with him could not be simply extrapolated to the coming match with Fischer. These were not just different people; Fischer symbolized the coming of an entirely new type of chess. Was this not obvious?...