Secret Days: Codebreaking in Bletchley Park: A Memoir of Hut Six and the Enigma Machine, Asa Briggs. Published by Frontline Books, England, 2011. First Edition. 8vo up to 9½” tall., 202 pp. with 26 coloured and black and white plates, bibliographical references and index. Black cloth with gilt spine titles. Contents are in fine, unread condition with a bit of dusting to outside edge. Unclipped dustjacket has a tiny split in spine and otherwise is fine.
Secret Days is a meticulously researched account of life in Hut Six, written by a codebreaker who worked there for five years alongside Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman. In addition to discussing the progress of the Allies codebreaking efforts and their impact on the war, Lord Briggs considers what the Germans knew about Bletchley and how they reacted to revelatory memoirs about the Enigma machine, which were not published until the 1970s.
Asa Briggs (1921-2016) – “the most prolific historian of his generation and, by common assent, the man who put nineteenth-century British history … on the academic map”.
