I was just passing through the Blackwell’s on campus here when I spotted Lorenz by Captain Jerry Roberts. I’m a sucker for books about the code breaking efforts at Bletchley Park. I loved the wider and gripping account of intelligence efforts in the UK during the war, Most Secret War by R.V Jones.

This book is about breaking the Lorenz (rather than the Enigma) code. Captain Roberts (whom my husband met) died in 2014 but the book was just published last year. War is often the crucible of innovation but we often think of material technologies (canned foods for Napoleon’s armies, Teflon in the Cold War/space race). The immaterial technology of codebreaking and computing was surely by far the most significant, though?

[amazon_link asins=’0750978856′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’3fcd013f-05d6-11e8-8679-a50298ecb88b’] [amazon_link asins=’0141042826′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’478db767-05d6-11e8-85a3-51ad437e956a’]