When scouring the land for top-level code breakers, the Bletchley Park recruiters left no stone unturned. As well as approaching the country's finest mathematicians, they cast their nets much wider, interviewing sixth-form music students who could read orchestral scores, chess masters, posts, linguists, hieroglyphics experts and high society debutantes fresh from finishing school.
To assess these individuals they devised various ingenious mind-twisters - hidden codes, cryptic crosswords, secret languages, complex riddles - and it is puzzles such as these, together with the fascinating recruitment stories that surround the, that make up the backbone of this book.
Accompanied by nuggets of historical fascination such as the story of David Omand who was asked to translate an essay written in made-up Elvish and ended up as Director of GCHQ, or Jean Valentine, who volunteered in Dundee aged 18, disclosed that she loved the challenge of a cryptic crossword and found herself whisked down to Bletchley, these brain-teasing puzzles and riddles will give you a taste of what it felt like to be tested by the keenest minds in the country.
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Bletchley Park brain teasers by Sinclair McKay
- ISBN 9781472252609
- Paperback, 15 x 23 x 2cm, 354g
- 288 pages
- Headline Publishing, 2017
