In the Oscar-winning movie The Imitation Game, code-breaker Alan Turing battles to master the problem of the German Enigma machine. But the real story begins in the bathroom of a Belgian hotel, where a French spymaster is photographing secret documents. A few months…
Traveller’s tale
The French edition of X, Y and Z – the real story of how Enigma was broken was launched last month. Things are different in France: the weather is better, the bread is wonderful, and the story of Enigma is…
What’s in a parvis in Paris?
According to Collins-Robert (1978 edition) a ‘parvis’ is a square in front of a church. On Wednesday 25 September the ‘Parvis Alan Turing’ was officially dedicated in Paris, the result of a collaboration between the Mairie of the 13th Arrondissement…
Fake quotes
We all know about fake news, but only recently I discovered fake quotes. I was asked where Alan Turing’s famous quotation ‘Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible’ had come from. After a lot of digging, the answer…
Who do you think you are?
One of the privileges of being related to someone voted to be Britain’s iconic person of the twentieth century is that you get to meet some really remarkable people. One of those days was Tuesday 14th May, when HRH the…
Dermot Turing launches the Polish edition of X, Y and Z
The hottest February day of all time is marked not just by the record-breaking weather but also a couple of other developments. One is the passing of another year, but as a peculiar birthday present it seems that the Polish…
The 300-year-old sum is 70 years old
2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union successfully testing its own version of an atomic bomb. It’s also the 70th anniversary of something rather less frightening, but highly disruptive in its own way, and, like nuclear weapons, one…
Bombe breaks through
The new Bletchley Park guidebook on the Bombe machine which helped break the Enigma cipher has been published. This book replaces the old Demystifying the bombe, which was a companion-piece to the Turing-Welchman Bombe Rebuild Trust machine on view at…
The Turing Trust Christmas Challenge 2018
The Turing Trust is taking part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge to raise funds to support our project "Digital Skills for Malawian Students". Any donations made between midday on Tuesday 27th November and Tuesday 4th December 2018 will be…
The Great War for Civilization
At the French Ambassador’s official residence on Friday 9 November there was a small, but formal, ceremony, at which five British service personnel who had, in different ways, contributed to the liberation of France in 1944, were honoured by being…
