Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, has a great capacity for putting people at ease. Flight delays have made me an hour late, but there he is at the top of the stairs of his Oslo home, holding open the door and saying: “It’s all right, I understand.” Yet this is, probably, the greatest player in the game, mobbed by screaming fans wherever he goes and in such commercial demand that his black cotton jacket is a veritable advertising billboard. On one breast is the logo of a law firm, on another an investment bank, on one arm an electrical company, and on the other a prominent Oslo newspaper — just some of the deals that earn him about £1m a year.
His house is a curious blend of styles. From a distance the heavy, gently sloping wooden roof and well-supported eaves suggest a traditional Swiss-style chalet. Yet the house, which has thick concrete walls, was built just 40 years ago by a Norwegian entrepreneur who was in the concrete business. Situated in Holmenkollen, in the west of Oslo, it overlooks the less prosperous east.
Carlsen was attracted by the view overlooking the Nordmarka (northern woodlands), with Bogstadvannet lake on one side and the Oslofjord, which connects to the sea, on the other. A short drive away is Oslo’s famous ski-jumping slope and the national arena for cross-country biathlon. Not that Carlsen skies much. A Real Madrid fan, his great recreation when not moving chess pieces is playing football with friends. And while he still keeps a flat in the centre of the city, this is home. With six bedrooms, it has space both for his parents and his three sisters.
Not so far away is November and Carlsen’s defence of his world chess championship title, which he has held since 2013. The match against 26-year-old Russian Sergey Karjakin takes place in a venue in New York with panoramic views of the Brooklyn Bridge and is billed in certain quarters as the 21st-century version of the 1972 cold war clash in Reykjavik between the maverick American Bobby Fischer and the Soviet world champion Boris Spassky. Fischer’s victory was regarded by some as proof of the superiority of the free world over the communist bloc. So will Carlsen be standing up for western values when he takes on Karjakin?
Carlsen hopes to find a way through the Russian’s defences via military history. “Not so long ago I read a book about Hitler, not in a Fischer kind of way admiring him, but an objective analysis of Hitler’s [military] successes and mistakes.” He had moved on to Hitler from Napoleon, whom he admired as a child “because he was up to a certain stage a great strategist”.