Enigma – Robert Harris

I hadn’t planned to read another Robert Harris novel, but I found this while tidying up a cupboard in school and re-read it (probably for the third time in the past 20 years) in an evening.  

I had forgotten some of the intricacies of the story.   We usually take Year 7 to Beaumanor Hall in Leicestershire for their activities week at the end of the summer term – and this was one of the intercept stations in the novel.  Jericho and Hester visit it and glean some vital plot-point information.

A number of nice bits of logic in the book – and obviously Turing and the early computers are a key element. 

(p384) “What was it Hardy had written? That a mathematical proof, like a chess problem, to be aesthetically satisfying, must possess three qualities: inevitability, unexpectedness and economy; that it should ‘resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way’.”

I’m sure I’ll read it again in another 5 or 6 years…