Tommy flowers 1905–98

On 1 September 1939, Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers found himself in Berlin to take part in a European conference about telephone systems. Germany invaded Poland the same day. Flowers and a fellow

I had to email to tip my hat in the general direction of Mr Grant. After listening to podcasts since the time when podcasts such as TWiT were still in single figures and my knees still worked, Lee’s e

It was December 1983, and Belgrade in former Yugoslavia was suffering a typically harsh winter. Temperatures had plummeted to as low as -10°C. Yet something happened that month which would warm the he

I greatly enjoyed your interview with Alice Roberts about her new book Domination, (Books Interview, September), and its argument that the church was essentially Rome rebadged, with its structures and

On a frosty New Year’s Day in 1944, a young soldier from Newcastle married the love of his life with barely four hours to spare. My father, Corporal George Bell, a conscript with the Royal Electrical

When I was a child, we had a tortoise called Winnie who had belonged to my father when he was a boy in the 1950s. He called his pet Winston after Churchill, but this name had to be changed when he dis