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Read the opening free
3,583 words · no email, no account
No. 078 · Science · Science
The Bletchley Park Hut
a biography of Alan Mathison Turing
What the book is
A half-eaten apple on a bedside table in Wilmslow, June 1954. The man beside it is forty-one years old. He has imagined the computer before it existed, broken the cipher that shortened a war by years, and asked, in print, whether a machine might one day think. His country has thanked him with a criminal conviction and a course of synthetic oestrogen.
Theodore Pemberton's biography moves between the mind and the life, refusing to separate them. It begins at Sherborne, with a solitary boy and the friend, Christopher Morcom, whose early death would shape every question Turing afterwards asked about thought, matter, and what survives the body. It follows him to a Grantchester meadow in 1935, where the idea of a universal machine first took shape, and to the huts at Bletchley Park, where abstraction became the daily, exhausting work of saving lives.
After the war came Manchester, the first stored-program computer, the paper on machine intelligence, and a burglary reported to the wrong policeman.
Pemberton writes with the patience of a mathematician and the attention of a novelist. What emerges is a portrait of a man who built the century we are still living in, and a quieter, harder argument about the cost extracted from him — and about a question, posed in 1950, that the world has not yet answered.
At a glance
- Subject
- Alan Mathison Turing
- Shelf
- Science · Science
- Written by
- Theodore Pemberton
- Chapters
- 18 across 214 pages
- Narrated by
- Miles Ashby
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The AppleRead free
- 02Maida Vale, St Leonards2,843 words
- 03Sherborne / Christopher4,395 words
- 04King's3,067 words
- 05The Tape3,562 words
- 06Princeton3,319 words
- 07Bletchley3,644 words
- 08Hut 83,442 words
- 09Joan3,354 words
- 10Ultra4,387 words
- 11ACE / NPL3,029 words
- 12Manchester3,020 words
- 13Can Machines Think?4,656 words
- 14Wilmslow3,180 words
- 15Regina v. Turing3,496 words
- 16The Estrogen3,834 words
- 17The Apple3,132 words
- 18The Pardon4,972 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 214 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 214 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-042-3 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby
ISBN 979-8-90623-023-2
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Bletchley Park Hut about?
Alan Mathison Turing. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bletchley Park Hut — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,583 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 64,500 words, 18 chapters, 214 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
