Recently I've come across the well-known game 2 from the Tal - Portisch candidate match 1965 via german magazine "Schach". The article was written by Marin. I was interested in the game and looked it up in Tal's book (written togehter with Koblenz "Der Weg zum Erfolg", in english probably "Study Chess with Tal"), which contains really good explanations. I was interested further to which degree the analysis and sacs played by Tal in this game withstand the engines. So I've checked in addition:
- Dvoretsky (chess tactics II, if I remember correctly)
- Kasparov (gread predecessors II)
- Svidler (video about Tal's games at chess24)

While Kasparov mostly quoted Tal and Dvoretsky, I got much out of Dvoretsky himself and Svidler. Dvoretsky provides many interesting thoughts on the game and whether Tal's approach was correct (to go for a rook sac in a positionally better position, when best defence by Portisch leads only to a draw). Svidler also provides interesting new aspects, even before the rook sac. Especially whether it's worth to give up a pawn in order to force the opponent to castle by hand (comparing this with some Caro-Kann games by Karpov featuring ...Ke7).

Overall I was impressed by the quality and originality of Tal's analysis and play (some minor errors aside withstanding the engines - so that he probably never was worse) and by the fresh look at it provided by Dvoretsky and Svidler.

In addition to Dvoretsky, which I'm also a big fan of, two books come to mind that discuss classical games and theories in light of later practice and insights: Watson's Secrets Of Modern Chess Strategy and Lars Bo Hansen's Improve Your Chess By Learning From The Champions.

Watson's book is so well-known I won't comment on the content, but the Hansen book is also quite interesting: It discusses the different "schools" of chess in roughly chronological order: Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern, "New Dynamism" (focused on Keres and Tal), Universal, Creative Concreteness, and Chess in the Future. While the actual games aren't in chronological order at all, since he jumps freely from classics to modern top-level games (before 2009) and his own games in order to show how similar ideas are still being used and developed.

There's a similar feeling of gradually developing ideas from the classics onward in Marovic's two books on [...] Pawn Play in Chess. His work looks more systematic than both Watson's and LB Hansen, but with the downside that Marovic includes so many well-known classics that someone with a good chess "education" may get bored. (En passant one thing I really appreciate in Jacob Aagaard's books is how he goes out of his way to find good but fresh examples that most readers will not have seen before. The polar opposite of a lazy author!)

I agree on Silman and Reassess Your Chess. Though actually I can still open the 3rd edition (one of the first chess books I devoured as a roughly 1500 player) and feel I get something out of it. I also have the 4th edition; It was completely rewritten with virtually all the games replaced. It's now computer-checked and may be great, even a better book than the 3rd, but I really feel it's aimed at a somewhat lower level than the 3rd edition was.

In recent years I have acquired all four books in the series "The Masters" from Everyman. Each book contains lots of tactical puzzles from the games of just one historical player: Spielmann, Alekhine, Tal and Spassky respectively. I'm hoping going through them will inspire me to go on to study these players' games in depth and thereby improve my attacking play and understanding of dynamics and sacrifices. Alekhine and Spassky are already among my favorite historical players (along with Smyslov and Karpov), partly based on the great games by them that are included in Silman's books.

I've thought about this a lot over the years: how do we best learn from the classics in modern times? I recently opened Romanovsky's Chess Middlegame Planning because I've never read much of it, but couldn't really get past how dated so many of the explanations seem.

I absolutely love those parts of Dvoretsky's series of books when he delves into a classic game. I find his explanations perfect: he gets at the instructional essence of the game in question, while pointing out where a modern player would have approached things differently.  I also think that Jeremy Salman does a fantastic job explaining some classic positions in How to Reassess Your Chess, though as a whole I feel that I'm a stronger player than that book is intended for.

Some authors have done a good job with games of particular players, or with particular themes (Marin's Learn from the Legends comes to mind, though I've only read a small part). Perhaps Kasparov's My Great Predecessors series comes closest to what I'm looking for, though it's rather long and I don't personally find Kasparov a great teacher.  I sometimes wish that an author like Dvoretsky had written a book or series along the lines of "everything a modern player needs to learn from the classics."

What do you guys think, how should we study the classics nowadays? Any particular books written in modern times that you'd recommend?