Bobby Fischer, one of the great chess players of the last century, is dead, aged - what else? - 64.

The controversial former world chess champion, Bobby Fischer, has died in Iceland at the age of 64. The US-born player, who became famous for beating Cold War Soviet rival Boris Spassky in 1972, died of an unspecified illness, his spokesman said.

He was granted Icelandic citizenship in 2005 as a way to avoid being deported to the US.

“Controversial” is a very British way of saying that the guy was, at least in his latter years, a deranged, anti-Semitic loon.

He was forced to seek refuge in Iceland due to his decision to play a lucrative rematch with Spassky in 1992 in Yugoslavia, in defiance of the international sanctions then in force, but it is doubtful whether he would have wanted to return to America, even had he been able to do so.

The crowning double irony, of course, is that Fischer was himself Jewish (on his mother’s side) and, a decade before the ebullient Garry Kasparov burst onto the world stage, had become chess’ first crossover star not so much for his chess, undeniably brilliant though it was, but by serving as a propaganda tool for the USA in his epic "Match of the Century" with Spassky in 1972. He worked hard to bury both memories; denying any Jewish family connection, even going so far as to write to the Encyclopedia Judaica to demand his entry be removed (they complied) and, amid a plethora of bizarre and unrealistic preconditions, allowing his world title to lapse in 1975, before vanishing into a reclusive obscurity for most of the rest of his life.

By the late 1990’s he was leading an itinerant life, and had become notorious for popping up in various parts of the world to indulge in increasingly bizarre anti-Jewish rants. On September 11, 2001, he infamously revelled in the attacks, telling a radio interviewer that “this is all wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for all.” He also called, inter alia, for a coup d’etat in the US, hoping that the newly-installed military government would round up and execute “hundreds of thousands of American Jewish leaders”, and close all the synagogues. In previous interviews on the same obscure Filipino radio station, he denounced Jews for inventing the Holocaust to make a buck and murdering Christian children to use their blood in “black-magic ceremonies” (a refreshing twist on matzoh balls, at least). Yes, “controversial” is as good a summary as any.

But, of course, he was also a prodigiously gifted chess player – the best of all time, many would argue, though figures such as the Cuban diplomat Jose Raul Capablanca and of course Kasparov himself have many partisans. I am no position to judge, but he did as much as anyone else in modern history to popularise the game, in the US at any rate. Fischer is not likely to be mourned far and wide, but among chess enthusiasts, at least, there will be sadness at his death.

How far do we make allowances for genius that we would not for anyone else? The cultural life of the West would be no poorer without the movies of Mel Gibson or the jazz stylings of Gilad Atzmon, but I would hate to imagine, if this is not too insufferably pretentious, a world without the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, or even the poetry of T.S. Eliot. There seems to me to be something especially disturbing, though, about prejudice and hatred when it’s manifested in someone so obviously talented. We are fond of explaining away racism and bigotry in our society as the product of ignorance and undereducation, and yet here was someone who was famous for his brainpower, his powers of analysis – who was famous, to deliberately oversimplify, for being really, really smart – and yet believed in the oldest and most insane conspiracy theories of all.

My appreciation of the beauty of chess is not, and will never be, sufficiently advanced to be able honestly to say that my life is the richer for Bobby Fischer’s having touched it, but we can certainly agree that political discourse is the better for his passing. Either way, a life less ordinary is hard to imagine.