Having bought this book in 2014 after a visit to Bletchley Park and before seeing the Imitation Game film, it has sadly been sat on my shelf for the past four years.
However I am so glad to have finally read it and I have laughed, been touched and have cried over this superbly written biography with details into the mathematics, computer science, engineering and biological theory that either inspired Alan or that which he theorised and made into reality which were needed. I am in no way a mathematician, engineer, computer scientist nor a biologist so some of the topics went completely over my head but this biography shows the type of man that Alan Turing was. A genius, man-boy with a heart of gold and seemed to be such a sweat heart when you see the antics he used to get up too for fun with his friends or for scientific purposes.
The death of Christopher and the subsequent journey that Alan went through of helping to break the enigma code and becoming the father of modern computing before being horrifically subjected to chemical castration, because he was gay, shows the gross injustice of the time towards gay and bisexual men that should never have happened and shouldn’t be repeated. It allows you to see the atrocities that LGBTQ+ people were subjected too because of who they were and Andrew Hodges manages to write it in a carefully constructed and sympathetic way without going too much into the horrific details that can be picked out from between the lines.
It is a hard one to start but perseverance is key in order understand exactly what drove Alan to be the man he became and hence we tragically lost.