Iceland, which last week gave sanctuary and a passport to Bobby Fischer, the eccentric American chess genius who has been running from the FBI for more than 12 years, is evidently grateful that his legendary 1972 world championship match put the country on the map. But his foul-mouthed arrival may give the lie to roseate Icelandic memories.

It was dimly possible to see in the bearded, 62-year-old wreck of Fischer, uttering oaths to the cameras as he ended eight months in Japanese custody, a younger John McEnroe version whose brattish behaviour and list of demands drove officials to distraction in Reykjavik three decades ago.

So insufferable were the chess prodigy’s objections to the chessboard, the lights, the curtains and the height of the lavatories that Henry Kissinger, then President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, was diverted from the bombing of Cambodia to plead with Fischer to take his seat opposite Boris Spassky, the Soviet world champion. Hailed as the greatest chess player of the 20th century, Fischer was also an embarrassment.

His requirements remain stubbornly precise. Iceland had better have a stockist for his shoes, for example. “He always wears these German shoes, Birkenstocks, and there is only one model of Birkenstocks that he will wear,” Miyoko Watai, his Japanese fiancée, revealed recently. “No variations. It is the same with watches, with radios.”

His new hosts may also fall short in the food department. Older Icelanders fondly recall that the 29-year-old Fischer subsisted on a diet of hamburgers. But during his five-year stay in Japan he developed a sophisticated appreciation of such delicacies as natto, a challenging fermentation of rotting soy beans that was delivered to him daily by his fiancée during his nine-month incarceration at the Ushiku detention centre, from where he faced deportation to the US.

These are only a few reasons why Iceland may count the cost of granting Fischer a get-out-of-jail-free card. His quarrel with America began in 1992, when he allegedly broke US sanctions against the former Yugoslavia by playing at a resort off Montenegro a return match against Spassky, which earned Fischer a £1.6m purse. When the US, also reportedly preparing tax evasion charges against him, revoked his passport, Japan was technically obliged to deport him. He denounced Japanese politicians as “gangsters” and “kidnappers”.

Fischer also applied for German citizenship on the grounds that his father was German. This was a bold gambit, given his anti-semitic rants. The Jews, he said, were “filthy, lying, bastard people” bent on world domination, while the Holocaust was “a money-making invention”.

Such tirades were all the more surprising because his parents were Jewish. He felt the same paranoia about the Russians. He was reported to have had all his dental fillings removed because he feared the Russians were using them to transmit radio signals to his brain. Sometimes he travelled with a suitcase full of pills. “If the commies come to poison me, I don’t want to make it easy for them,” he declared.

Fischer became a devotee of the Worldwide Church of God, a California-based evangelical sect, only to claim later that it had taken hundreds of dollars from him. He switched his rabid attacks from commies to America, at one point adopting an e-mail address stating “US-is-shit”. He finally burnt his boats with his homeland after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. He told a radio station in the Philippines that Al-Qaeda’s action was “wonderful news . . . I applaud the act. F*** the US. I want to see the US wiped out”.

He made regular visits to the Philippines — he was arrested and detained by Japanese officials while embarking on a flight to Manila — ostensibly to renew his Japanese visa. But a newspaper claimed he had a Filipina wife or girlfriend and a young daughter. His fiancée, who is head of the Japan Chess Association, said she was not sure about the story. “But I understand he’s never been married before,” she added.

He met Watai in 1973, the year after his titanic struggle with Spassky, when she was a promising young chess player who volunteered to act as his guide in Tokyo. Their romance began in earnest in 1992 and recently they planned to marry, but he could not formalise the union without a passport.

In a recent interview she said: “He’s honest and gentle, although he’s not good at socialising. Once he believes in something, he’s incapable of changing his mind. He is very difficult to live with.”

Spassky, his old rival, offered another insight in a personal appeal to President Bush. “Bobby is a tragic personality,” he wrote. As an accomplice to Fischer’s “crime”, he asked to be arrested and put in the same cell with Fischer. “And give us a chess set,” he added. Fischer did not appreciate the gesture, commenting: “He was trying to make me sound like a weirdie. I don’t want Spassky in my cell. I want a chick.”