Two years ago Peter mystified the rest of the chess world by playing in a modest event in Gibraltar, most popular with English chess amateurs keen for a bit of sun and games on the southernmost tip of Europe. He explained to me that he agreed only because the Australian organiser of the tournament had promised to bowl to him in a cricket net on the Rock if he played: there exists on YouTube a video of Svidler batting in said net, demonstrating some very passable square cuts and straight drives.

In fact he is unusually well co-ordinated, physically, for a chess player. Among his other passions is snooker, and he played the game semi-professionally for a number of years (or as he put it to me, "I played a lot, and for money"). This is perhaps part of Peter's all-round Anglophilia — he much prefers Martin Amis to Leo Tolstoy — although it might also just be characteristic of a natural games player.

Now that he is married, with two young children, Svidler's days in the snooker halls are over; perhaps responsibility for a family has forced him to dedicate himself more than before to chess, which is after all the only profession he has (although he tells me only half jokingly that his ultimate ambition is to be "Russia's top cricket commentator").

It is clear that to have achieved what he has already in chess, without the unremitting study of his rivals, is the mark of an extraordinary natural talent. Thus the editor of the Russian chess magazine 64, Mark Gluhovsky, says that while most top chess players are characterised by an iron will and work ethic: "Very few can get by on pure genius, like Svidler." This attitude has at times exasperated his colleagues in the Russian national team, most notably after his last-round loss against Spain in the 2010 Chess Olympiad made it impossible for Russia to take the coveted gold medal. 

The team's trainer, Evgeny Bareev, afterwards let rip: "Svidler's potential is colossal! [But] it's a question of his relationship with chess — it isn't the most important thing to him any more. Chess doesn't forgive such a relationship. I shouted to him about it before the tournament, and during it, but what of it? Together with Svidler, chess punished the whole team — and also the trainer, who took a man into his team who doesn't love chess."