The 1993 World Chess Championship was one of the most eagerly anticipated clashes in the game's rich history. On one side was Garri Kasparov, the greatest in a long line of Russian World Champions and a player whose remorseless aggression both in play and in person seemed to terrify his opponents. Across the board was Nigel Short, a bespectacled, guitar-playing twenty-eight-year-old Lancastrian who had earned his place in the contest over a grueling...