The English chess writer Edward Winter has this in common with God, that his existence can only be deduced from his works. Nobody has ever seen him. There are no photographs of him. He has an address in Geneva and he answers his mail, but intrepid seekers for biographical information get a curt reply that tells them that only matters of chess can be discussed. Because Winter has clearly shown for more than fifteen years that his heart is with the old masters, more than with modern chess, his image is that of a very old man, but this is denied by those to whom it has been imparted by word of mouth that he has been seen in the flesh as recent as the seventies, in the form of an English schoolboy, and that even the notation of a chess game of his has been preserved.
Winter is a just but stern supervisor of chess literature.
And that it was for eight years. Then suddenly Winter closed down his magazine because his correspondents had not been as arduous as he had wished. A few years later he continued his labours of purification on his own in a column that is published in several chess magazines. It is a rich album of games, brilliant, edifying or at least curious, chess trivia, scourging book reviews and deep investigations. What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.