This complex and contradictory future, rather than a 1930s vision of scientifically planned industry, or a 1950s fantasy of scientific mind-control, was the achievement of the new men.

The old moral and social institutions, while persisting in form, would lose their absoluteness and all-embracing significance; even a bishop would soon be borrowing Carpenter's phrase and preaching a 'New Morality'.

The lesson of the public schools, and of the no less grim training grounds of the lower orders, had been outdated in the 1920s and proved quite useless in crucial aspects of the Second World War, a fact learnt so reluctantly and so late.

Alan Turing's split state prefigured the pattern of growth that he did not choose to live to see: a civilisation where the singing and dancing and mating—and the thinking about numbers—would be offered to a wider class, but one built around, and working to provide, methods and machines of inconceivable danger.

And in his very silence, he typified the mainstream of scientific collaboration in this policy.

Who could see that in fact he had torn the curtain away and shown the fragile, erratic, embarrassing brain that lay behind the machine? For unlike Dorothy, he said not a word.

He was no heretic: this was camouflage, although perhaps even he, who so rarely broke his promises, only just restrained himself at the end. Within his sphere he was the grand master; politically he was as he described himself in 1941: Churchill's obedient servant.