In short, How to Fool Fritz seems a better exercise in how to fool buyers of chess books than any real attempt at contributing a useful addition to the existing corpus of computer chess literature.

(Steve Lopez in ChessCafe.com on a book by Albert H. Alberts)

When we did The Blue Room [1992], they played the video in the background while we played chess. At first the producers asked if we could play with a keyboard next to the chess set, but we decided it was getting silly. We were trying to play properly, but Kris [Weston] started cheating and taking pieces off. My enduring memory of the day is that, while being intoxicated, we asked Take That if they wanted to play football in the corridors - they declined. ...

Alex Paterson

(from here)

There's an interesting book by Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, that is about the pre-modern history of chess. When chess came to Europe, via Byzantium, there was no queen. There was a vizier piece. But the European change was to make the vizier a queen. Still, the Queen, like the king, was not an aggressive piece: it could only move a space at a time. During this period, chess was a popular court game for both men and women. The change in the game came with giving the queen the power the piece has today. This made the game faster, and it also led to exhibits of chess mastery in which, gradually, women chess players were weeded out. Women turned to card games - except in Russia, which was the last nation to accept the new, powerful queen. Russia turned to European chess under Catherine the great.

From the comments to the seduction of chess, a post on chess and modernism

... in the best chess country in the world and in history (Russia) the Queen is actually still called a ферзь (ferz). That means something like minister, counsellor, advisor - but anyway is, most definitely, male.