Book: Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

I saw the film imitation game before christmas.  A good film but it felt like it mainly covered Turing from the war years.  So I bought the book as I wanted to find out more about him.

It is a large book, but very readable.  It covers Turing's early years very well and you get a good impression of what shaped him.  Both the public school/Cambridge system, the tragic death of his school friend Christopher Morcom, and his repressed homosexuality.

Of course the war and the cracking of enigma is a large part of the book.  The last part of the book is the birth of computing and Turing's vision of what computers could do (despite being surrounded by early computers which were primitive to say the least).

The book covers right up to his tragic death, presumed suicide and also gives a good social coverage of Britain at that time.