Notes by the author, Andrew Hodges

I am represented by Zeno Literary Agency if you have questions concerning translation or other rights.

• Translation into German by Rolf Herken and Eva Lack: Alan Turing, Enigma,
  ISBN 3-211-82627-0, Springer Verlag, Wien.


• Translation into French by N. Zimmermann: Alan Turing ou l'enigme de l'intelligence,
  ISBN 2-228-88082-7, Editions Payot. A number of passages are omitted.


• Translation into Italian by David Mezzacapa: Storia di un Enigma,
  ISBN 88-339-0639-6, Bollati Boringhieri.
  I had the honour of receiving an Italian literary prize, the Premio Giovanni Comisso, in 1992.


• Translation into Polish by W. Bartol, ISBN 85-7255-087-5, Proszynski
  See an extract from the Polish edition. Buy online from www.merlin.com.pl


• Chinese translation, ISBN 7535768784, Hunan Science and Technology Press. Available here.


• A Japanese edition is in preparation.

Continue to the Index of Extracts

Continue to the on-line Update.

Turing's rehabilitation from over a quarter-century's embarrassed silence was largely the result of Andrew Hodges's superb biography, Alan Turing: The enigma (1983; reissued with a new introduction in 2012). Hodges examined available primary sources and interviewed surviving witnesses to elucidate Turing's multiple dimensions. A mathematician, Hodges ably explained Turing's intellectual accomplishments with insight, and situated them within their wider historical contexts. He also empathetically explored the centrality of Turing's sexual identity to his thought and life in a persuasive rather than reductive way..

Two decades ago, a mathematician named Andrew Hodges published 'Alan Turing: The Enigma', which is one of the finest scientific biographies ever written, and has remained an essential resource for all subsequent accounts of Turing's life.

Listed as one of the essential 50 books of all time in the The Guardian,  1 June 2002.

I was fortunate to have available Andrew Hodges's poignant, beautifully written biography of Turing.

One of the finest scientific biographies I've ever read: authoritative, superbly researched, deeply sympathetic and beautifully told.

A captivating, compassionate portrait of a first-rate scientist who gave so much to a world that in the end cruelly rejected him. Perceptive and absorbing, Andrew Hodges's book is scientific biography at its best.

'I wish I'd written,' by Ray Monk

There are many things I wish I could write, but realise I never will: poetry, drama, travelogues, situation comedies, to mention but a few. But a book I wish I had written, and one that was a big inspiration for the things I have written, is Alan Turing: the Enigma  by Andrew Hodges. I read it when it first came out in 1983, and immediately formed the ambition to write something similar about Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Hodges's great achievement was to link the work and life of a scientist in a way that had scarcely been attempted before, and in a manner that avoided many of the obvious pitfalls. Hodges, like Turing, is a mathematician, and was thus able to understand and describe Turing's pioneering work in mathematical logic — and his momentously important codebreaking work during the war — at a depth that would have been beyond most biographers. Like Turing also, Hodges is gay, and his description of Turing's prosecution in 1952 for 'gross indecency' and the tragic events leading up to it, is written with great empathy and an entirely appropriate indignation.

It is an almost perfect match of biographer and subject, and, though Hodges is determined, as he puts it, 'to overcome the twentieth-century chasm between scientific thought and human life,' he has the sensitivity to realise that the events of a person's life can never 'explain' the greatness of their thought. Rather than attempt such an explanation, he integrates the work with the life, allowing the reader to see the connections between the two. In doing so, he created not only a great book, but a whole new kind of biographical writing.

Desert Island Book Choice by Margaret Boden

My choice is the biography Alan Turing...  by Andrew Hodges. This superb biography satisfies many of the intellectual senses. Written by a mathematician, it describes in plain language Turing's work on the foundations of computer science and how he broke the Germans' Enigma code in the Second World War. The subtle depiction of class rivalries, personal relationships, and Turing's tragic end are worthy of a novel. But this was a real person. Hodges describes the man, and the science that fascinated him — which once saved, and still influences, our lives.

This book is a first-rate presentation of the life of a first-rate scientific mind... it is hard to imagine a more thoughtful and warm biography than this one.

It is a first-class contribution to history and an exemplary work of biography.

Andrew Hodges's book is of exemplary scholarship and sympathy. Intimate, perceptive and insightful, it's also the most readable biography I've picked up in some time.

... the first serious synthesis of mathematical and gay liberationist insight... a new standard in writing about gay people in the past. It is the moving story of a man with a brilliant mind, who refused to deny his feelings, in a search to understand — and live — true life.

Paperback buy of the season

In 1996 it appeared as a television film, also featuring Derek Jacobi.

They performed a segment of the work, He dreamed of machines, during a concert in Salford with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, broadcast on 6 December 2012.

• A YouTube clip of the song.