No, not another rant about the Coronavirus situation. Actually, a sparkle amid the gloom: the news that John Lennon’s piano is to be put on display at Strawberry Field in Liverpool. Apparently he bought it in 1970, and although it’s…
Author: njturing
Volunteer at the Turing Trust
Of tool-boxes and ballot-boxes
My first lunch after lockdown took place in the attractive surroundings of the Ognisko Polskie restaurant in South Kensington. The sun was shining and the railways weren’t working, all of which signalled something close to a return to normal. The…
Dermot Turing on tour
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…
Read More Dermot Turing launches the Polish edition of X, Y and Z
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…
