Book review: Chess Queens – A chess insider gives a glimpse into a secretive, segregated game

Jennifer Shahade’s study of chess’s greatest ever female players is revealing and absorbing despite its occasional generalisations

Jennifer Shahade: in her book Chess Queens, the two-time US women’s chess champion describes the lives of the female pioneers of chess while offering her insider perspective on the chess world

Ukrainian-born Lyudmila Rudenko won the Women's World Chess Championship in 1950. She was representing the USSR at a time when Cold War tensions were extremely fraught. After she lost her first-round game to an American, the Soviet authorities threatened to send her to Siberia, even though she had been a USSR war hero.

During the 872-day siege of Leningrad which claimed more than one million Soviet lives, Rudenko evaded enemy lines and arranged for a ...