Alan Turing is a fascinating subject for a biography: A leader in the fields of logical mathematics and computing, a war hero of a very different kind, and a social misfit. There’s so much to explore, and so much to learn. Yet, before turning to this definitive volume, I hadn’t read a proper biography of the man – although given the size of his standing in our cultural, intellectual and scientific past, I had a fairly good knowledge of many of the key moments in his story.

This comprehensive biography is certainly detailed. It is, perhaps, the most thorough biography I’ve read. This allows a great insight into the character and intelligence of Turing, but it did quickly become unnecessarily dense in parts, and felt like it was veering off at a tangent by placing Turing’s academic work in a wider context than was really necessary. I don’t think the book needed to explain some of the mathematical concepts in quite the detail it did, nor did it need to explain in fine detail the sequelae of those concepts as discovered by others.

I was also a little uncomfortable with the degree of subjectiveness in this description of his life. Clearly, it is impossible for any biography to be written from a totally objective stand-point, but it is clear that Hodges stands in awe of Turing, and constantly tries to explain and justify anything that could be seen as a fault in him. There were times when motives and opinions seemed to have been assigned to Turing’s actions without a clear explanation given as to how Hodges had derived these, which made me question their veracity. I’m also awed of Turing and think he’s a giant of our age, but even I found the warmth, bordering on sycophancy, of this book a little overbearing. I think the point would have actually been made more strongly had the reader been left to draw their own conclusions from a more objective description of the events.

I was disappointed with some of the omissions of this book. Turing was clearly a man with a strong sense of morality and ethics, and yet cryptography – perhaps his best-known skill – has inherent within it the ethical complexity of choosing when to act on intelligence, and when to ignore it and effectively sacrifice people in order to maintain the illusion that the code has not been broken. This, to me, is one of the most profoundly interesting parts of the work completed at Bletchley, and of cryptography, yet this is given relatively short shrift in this biography. I feel sure that Turing would have reflected on this point, and probably had interesting things to say about it, so it seems a shame that they aren’t discussed here. Perhaps this reflects a wider criticism of the book – it’s difficult at times to pick out Turing’s character amongst the reams of detailed mathematical and computational theory. That said, I think the story and an impression of the character of Turing does manage to shine through over the course of the book as a whole, even if it is hard-going in parts.

It’s really difficult to give this book a star-rating, because there are passages of five-star descriptive biographical brilliance, and passages of five-star mathematical or computational explanation, but the two cannot really happily co-exist in one volume. For a general reader like me, it leads to passages of tedium; the opposite passages would probably have the same effect for someone reading for the theory.

My head says, therefore, that this is a three-star read; but my heart, perhaps more because of the piquancy of the tale, says it’s a four-star read. So I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Alan Turing: The Enigma is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback, and also a special Centenary edition. There’s no Kindle edition available, which may well have frustrated Alan if he were alive today, and is really inexcusable when a new edition has only just been published.

Given that we’re in the middle of the annual GCSE and A-Level results period, and especially given the recent debates on reform of the exam system, I thought this was a particularly apt choice for this week’s book review.

Jerry Jarvis was formerly the managing director of the Edexcel exam board, until he very publicly quit in 2009 over concerns about the grade calibration of A-Levels in particular. In this book, he explains in some detail his reasons for leaving, muses on the state of the system as is, and gives suggestions to pupils and parents considering their educational choices.

It was actually quite a good book. It was certainly less dry than the subject matter might suggest, though it was rather short: it read more like an extended briefing paper than a short book.

There was nothing that struck me as especially ground-breaking in here, but as someone who sat their A-Levels within the last decade, perhaps that’s unsurprising. I think it would be revealing to those who are less well versed in England’s examination system.

Jarvis gives a spirited defence of the exam system, and explains why grade inflation doesn’t indicate declining standards: in fact, he makes the point that we should really expected greater grade inflation than we actually have, which perhaps hides the fact that standards in schools are not improving at the rate one might expect from the level of investment. He bemoans schools’ lack of action over poorly performing teachers, and their lack of engagement with the detailed feedback data that is provided. This was a little eye-opening: I hadn’t realised that teachers had access to such detailed breakdown on their pupils’ performance, so as to enable them to target specific areas of their teaching practice for improvement.

There were a couple of decently amusing anecdotes, like the time he was tasked with estimating how much each individual pupil’s performance had been affected by the escape of a pet frog during an exam sitting, and these did add a little levity to the book.

I suspect that student and parents of students actively sitting GCSEs or A-Levels, or making choices about what to study, would have a much more active interest in this book than I. But, having said that, as a general reader I found it really quite interesting, and given it’s brevity, most people will probably find it a worthwhile read.

Cheats, Choices and Dumbing Down is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Somehow, despite being a virtually card-carrying Guardianista, I’d never read one of Jon Ronson’s books. This one seemed as good a starting point as any!

The book describes Ronson’s adventures with several extremist groups and conspiracy theorists as he tries to find out more about the Bilderberg Group, who are thought by many conspiracy theorists to summarily control the world. It’s long-form gonzo journalism, with the added edge that Ronson is Jewish, while a number of the groups he meets along the way are, to a greater or lesser extent, anti-semitic.

The narrative of the book is engaging, and some of the descriptions are enlightening. But it feels to me like there’s a central problem in this book: Ronson seems quite conflicted over his feelings about the people he meets. Occasionally, he plays their beliefs for laughs, but, for the most part, it seems reasonably clear that he likes the individuals whilst finding their viewpoints and some of their actions abhorrent. This was and is always going to be a problem in an ethnography like this, but the fact that there’s never any deep reflection on this in the text just gives the whole thing an air of awkwardness.

There’s also a slight weirdness in that it seems to me that the point the book is trying to make is that relatively ordinary people can believe extraordinary things with certainty. That’s a really interesting concept, but, again, there’s no real self-reflection on this. Did this experience make Ronson question any of his own deeply-held beliefs? Has it made him view conspiracies and conspiracists differently? How has this whole experience changed him?

Ronson writes engagingly about the challenge of going through this investigation as a Jew. He reflects on denying his Jewish heritage, and how that makes him feel. Yet the other big questions seem to hang in the air, and I’m left wondering what the gonzo style adds if the majority of the deep personal reflection is cut out of it. I guess it provides a narrative. But it takes away objectivity, and makes us very reliant on the author as the sole source. I’m not sure those trades are worth it if the impact on the author – which is really something I consider to be at the heart of the style – is taken away.

I’m conscious that I’ve now written three paragraphs of criticism of a book that, on the whole, I enjoyed! I learned the truth about the Bilderberg Group (not that I’d heard of it before reading this book). There were several convincing descriptions of how conspiracy theorists interpret events in a way that supports their own world view (though, disappointingly, little discussion of the degree to which the rest of us do that too). The writing brought the characters to life, and the narrative drove the “plot” forward at a good pace.

All-in-all, while I was a bit disappointed by what wasn’t in this book, the stuff that was there was great: I’ll certainly read another of Ronson’s books at some point in the future. As for the star-rating: I’ve dithered for some time now over whether to give this 3 or 4; it’s somewhere in between. On balance, this isn’t a book I’d return to again, and I think its flaws of omission pull it nearer to 3 than 4.

Them is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Inflight Science gives a brief tour of some major science concepts set loosely around the fact that you’re supposed to read it on a plane. There are miniature “experiments” to carry out whilst airborne (e.g. throwing a ball of paper in the air and noting that it doesn’t fly to the back of the plane), and all of the topics discussed are loosely associated with flying.

There’s nothing especially wrong with this concept. Its nature means that the explanations are brief, and the science discussed doesn’t go much above high-school level. Some of the links to being in-flight are tenuous at best: syphons are explained because toilets on planes don’t use them, for example.

My main complaints about this book are that it’s a touch simple, and a touch bland. There isn’t all that much about the science of flight, which is disappointing.

All-in-all, it’s a so-so book that whizzes through a few probably familiar scientific concepts. It might entertain you through a short flight, but you won’t be so riveted you’ll want to pick it up again once you land, and there are much better things you could be reading.

Inflight Science is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This is a delightful book that I only came across after it was recommended by Shelagh Fogarty on Twitter.

It’s short, and full (mainly) of short anecdotes and reflections on events in the late Nora Ephron’s life. Sometimes, these take the form of full-on autobiographical anecdotes, such as her story of how she got into journalism. Others are just straight-out opinions, such as her six stages of her relationship with email. All are joyously funny; some are also quite touching. The whole gives a real sense of Ephron as a person. And the quality of the writing throughout is just sublime.

Some reviewers have complained about a degree of “bitchiness” in this book – and it’s true to say that Ephron’s opinions aren’t universally positive about everything. But I read these opinions as honestly held, and found them endearing.

There are glorious descriptions of some of Ephron’s reactions to the absurdity of celebrity, and the challenges of ageing: from how she reacts to finding a dish named after her in a restaurant, to coping with an inability to remember names.

There’s a chapter in this book that deals with Ephron’s “flops”: her films and plays that have failed to become financial successes. She describes with honesty how this feels, how it can never quite be forgotten, and how the failures stayed with her far longer than the successes. I’m someone who generally advocates embracing and learning from failure, and this chapter really made me view this in a different way. In a creative context, “success” and “failure” are difficult to define: Ephron considers her finest play to be one that commercially flopped. How can one learn from failure when, in the liberal arts, failure is very subjective? I know that’s probably obvious to most people, but this chapter really made me consider this in some depth.

I know that some have been irritated by the brevity of this book. It is very short. Yet I find it difficult to criticise something just because it’s brief: this is brief but excellent, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

I really like reading books about other people’s jobs. I don’t quite know why I’m attracted to this type of book, but I almost always really enjoy them. So, since this was an Amazon best-seller, I thought it was worth a try. Unfortunately, this proved to be an exception to the rule.

Herrring gives an account of working as an IT officer onboard a number of cruise ships. He talks a little about his job, though these sections quickly become repetitive as he describes the same processes on several ships. He tries a bit of amateur anthropology as well, drawing conclusions as earth-shattering as discovering that people from the same country tend to stick together, as do those with the same job. But, perhaps surprisingly, the bulk of this book is about his sex life.

Now, I have nothing against books like this discussing sex. Clearly, to Herring, the the promiscuity that he and his fellow crew experience during their time working onboard cruise ships was a large part of the experience, and so it would be most unusual not to discuss it. But this goes far beyond that: this isn’t discussion of the general point, this is bizarre description of individual sexual encounters.

In fact, he times a number of the sexual encounters and reports their length to the second. As someone reading to find out about other working lifestyles, I can honestly say that I have precisely no interest in the fact that his sexual encounter with a youth counsellor from South Africa lasted only 91 seconds, nor that his encounter with a Lithuanian lasted two minutes and three seconds. Frankly, I’m amazed that anyone was interested enough to publish these sections!

The doctor in me is a little bit disappointed too that massively excessive alcohol consumption is discussed throughout with little regard paid to the consequences. There is a brief description of someone who has a physical dependence on alcohol, but little discussion of the wider problem, and no mention at all of any long-term negative effects of daily excessive consumption.

There is also a frankly bizarre chapter on booking cruises which appears to have been sponsored by a cruise provider, but isn’t clearly marked as such, which is a bit disappointing.

I don’t want to give the impression that this book is all bad. I did make it to the end of the book. There are some revealing insights in there. There are a few moments of humour. But my overall impression was one of this being a deeply bizarre and flawed book. The content could probably be edited and re-worked into a reasonable feature for a Sunday newspaper magazine – but in its current form, I really don’t feel able to recommend this book.

The Truth About Cruise Ships is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.