Chess-player

The ardent spirit of the First Consul deprecates inactivity, and with a skilful eye looks forward as many moves as an expert Chess-player.

Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other.

The chess-player also has need of a quick eye and a steady nerve; […]

Cuddling is what an epidemic of lovers are doing all around us on this nippy, dazzling day. Entangled in each other like doting octopi, sweethearts are seizing the day, the hour, the magic minute. And frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn about us. Neither do the tai chi folks, pétanque players, tae kwon-do enthusiasts, oriental sword-twirlers, tennis jocks, wistful old ladies, kids on ponies, joggers, képi-capped guards, bistro waiters, chess-players, pipi ladies (50 centîmes for the loo, s’il vous plaît) or pigeons.

He was a champion chess-player in his early teens, finished his A-levels at 16, built a multi-million-selling videogame by 17, got a double First in computer science from Cambridge, a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, published research in neuroscience that was listed as one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2007 and became an academic at MIT and Harvard.