Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Fall of a Genius
By Stephen Toulmin
Alan Turing: The Enigma
by Andrew Hodges
Simon and Schuster, 587 pp., $22.50
Cambridge University has always been hospitable to powerful but eccentric intellects. Again and again, solitary Cambridge thinkers have conceived, and given clear definitions to, the new ideas of later generations. One may think of young Isaac Newton, banished home to Lincolnshire in the 1660s to sit out the Great Plague; or of Charles Darwin in the 1840s and 1850s, back from the Beagle circumnavigation and wandering in the chalk hills around his house at Downe in Kent. Conversely, Cambridge tends to be a bit out of touch with worldly things. ('Oxford men think the world belongs to them,' the saying was, 'Cambridge men don't care who it belongs to.') At best, the luminaries of Cambridge expected to deal with the world on their own idiosyncratic terms. So Newton became an autocratic Master of the Mint and lifelong president of the Royal Society; while, after a short spell as secretary of the Geological Society of London, Darwin retired to the country and enjoyed just that degree of ill health he needed in order to protect himself from intrusions that would interrupt his scientific writing.
Review, 3620 words
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