Tartakower was a grandmaster and writer of wit and erudition whose annotations are perennially fresh and provocative. As a player he achieved a string of important first prizes such as London 1927 and Liege 1930 which brought him within a whisker of a world championship challenge against Alekhine. Tartakower's refusal to accept any kind of dogma or restraint on thinking makes him an ideal role model for the iconoclastic chess players of the 21st century who take no generalised assertion on trust until it has been thoroughly analysed and tested.