Written by perhaps the best journalist who has made it their business to explore and expose the more nefarious aspects of UK foreign policy in recent decades, this book should be read by all interested in UK foreign policy.

Written in an accessible style, this book provides details about the manipulation of the UK official record in places as diverse as Kenya, Yemen, Cyprus, and the UK itself.

The book illuminates key moments in history and explains slightly confounding terms such as D-Notices and the Official Secrets Act.

This book has appeared under various titles and guises since its first publication in 1972. It is now available as The Penguin History of the Second World War. It is a bit like three books in one, since each author tackles a different theatre of World War 2.

There is a wonderful and possibly apocryphal publishing story about the changes the book underwent over the years. Peter Calvocoressi was always a distinguished historian, but at the time this book first appeared in 1972, "Calvo" was CEO of Penguin Books, and they were the book’s publishers. At that time, Penguin also boasted one of the most brilliant editors in British publishing, Dieter Pevsner. Dieter was (naturally) the right man to edit his boss’s book. Having read it through, Dieter had a question for the boss. “I just don’t understand,” Dieter told Calvo, “how we won the Atlantic submarine war.” Calvo… show more.

The Enigma story and Bletchley Park are now legitimate subjects for academic study, but modern books are necessarily written by people without first-hand experience of wartime Intelligence work. As a publisher, I have always been keen to record the experiences of those people personally involved in such things, and Welchman was not just a leading codebreaker at Bletchley Park throughout the whole war, he was also instrumental in transforming a random collection of a hundred academics into a non-stop production line of codebreaking and Intelligence, employing over ten thousand people. This, our best-selling book, continues to intrigue readers worldwide.

I’m blown away by the efforts put forth by women to crack enemy code during WWII at Bletchley Park, England, while in a stealth mode. I was stunned by the decades these women and men kept the secret about their jobs there. The high stakes and the challenges faced made this a page-turner, which isn’t always the case for a nonfiction title. I’m impressed by the recruitment of women via word puzzle and crossword puzzle contests in the newspaper. 

The brilliant code-cracking skills revealed in these stories highlight intelligence and the fierce country loyalty towards ending the war. Sinclair is really good at interviewing his subjects and putting the stories into context. I’ll sneak in The Rose Code as a novel on the same topic.

The brilliance of the Bletchley Park codebreakers is undoubted, but it must be remembered that they did not start from scratch; they built on the work of the cryptanalysts of the Polish Cipher Bureau, who had first broken Enigma ciphers in 1932, and then passed on all their knowledge to Britain in 1939, before the war began. The tentative and suspicious negotiations between Poland, France and the UK were convoluted and lengthy. Alan Turing’s nephew conducted ground-breaking research in archives in the UK, France, Germany, Poland and the USA to compile this unrivalled account of those early days.

This is a book that is at once a biography, a testament to human genius in the face of imminent danger, and a story of human injustice. Alan Turing had an idea about a ‘universal machine’. A machine, when built at Bletchley Park, allowed the Allies in World War II to crack the German Enigma ciphers. This universal machine laid the foundations for modern computing and all the amazing advances we enjoy today. But at a price for Turing, he fought inner demons about his homosexuality and eventually paid the ultimate price.

I marveled at his genius, cheered his cryptographic successes with each cipher cracked, shouted against the tragedy of his arrest, cried at his untimely death. A death at his own hand at the age of 41. The world lost a genius due to a society’s labelling of homosexuality as a crime.

We still live in this world of… show more.

This anthology is a valuable complement to my first book, with a couple of dozen contributors: a mixture of some who worked at Bletchley Park during the war, and some who are professional historians. The passage of time has encouraged archival research, and allowed historical analysis, producing an authoritative account of Bletchley’s achievements, particularly the breaking of millions of Enigma-enciphered messages.