I spent a lot of time kicking a ball by myself in nearby parks, but I had some good friends and a relatively close extended family, and whatever pain or confusion remained was sublimated through my benign addiction to chess. I was educated mostly at Skene Square Primary and Aberdeen Grammar School (with a couple of years in the middle in Whitton, just outside London). 

I travelled widely as a chess professional for a year after school before going to Keble College, Oxford, and earning a first-class degree in politics, philosophy, and economics. I spent three more years as a chess professional before going on to Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education as a master’s student studying mind, brain, and education. I returned to the UK to complete a Ph.D. in Education at Bristol University in 2008, with a thesis on the concept of wisdom. 

In 2016 I built on my experience on the RSA by co-founding Perspectiva with the Swedish social theorist and entrepreneur Tomas Bjorkman. Perspectiva is a collective of expert generalists seeking to understand the relationship between systems, souls and society in theory and practice. A year later, I was awarded an Open Society Fellowship in 2017, for which I contextualised the perceived crisis in human rights violations within the broader and deeper 'meta-crisis' of liberal democracy; the broadly liberal, rational and materialist perspectives from which we construct our idea of crisis often confounds our capacity to address spiritual root causes that exist within, between and beyond those perspectives. I am also a research fellow at the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey. 

Throughout this time I was developing as a chess player. I became a Grandmaster in 1999 just after leaving Oxford and while working on my doctorate I won the British Chess Championship in three consecutive years (2004-6). I was never quite sure what I was trying to achieve in chess, but my rating did go over my target of 2600 a few times before dropping back down to the ridiculously close 2599. My highest world ranking was 139 in 2005 when I was 28. Doubtless there was scope to go a little higher up the rankings, but also clear limits.

I was part of World Champion Viswanathan Anand’s analytical team in 2008, and came to see clearly the gap between merely strong and truly elite grandmasters. When I realised I was becoming a father, and when chess remained interesting but ceased to feel quite so important, I managed to get ‘a proper job’ at the nexus of academia, journalism and campaigning as a Senior Researcher at the Royal Society of Arts where I developed a talent for fundraising and rose to become Director of The Social Brain Centre. Over the course of six years, I published a range of influential reports and curated a range of events on behaviour change, climate change, and spirituality. 

As you can see from this site, I have written a wide range of reports and essays of various kinds, and I have written five books so far; three for chess playing audiences and two for the general reader. Spiritualise: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges was published by RSA/Perspectiva in 2016, and in 2019 Bloomsbury published my ‘accidental memoir’, The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life.

At the time this site goes live in April 2021, I am about to turn 44, chess remains a big part of my psyche but not my purpose, Perspectiva is going well and I live in London with my wife Siva and our children Kailash and Vishnu. Thanks for reading.