The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

Alan Turing wasn't the only Brit with a genius for code cracking. The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes introduces readers to George Scovell, an engraver's apprentice who stumbled into a job as the Duke of Wellington's decoder and managed to unravel Bonaparte's legendary Great Paris Cipher, which contained 1,400 coded elements. Mark Urban, a BBC correspondent, chronicles Wellington's campaigns against the French from the battle of Corunna in 1809 to the 1815 victory at Waterloo, showing how Scovell's decoding of enemy communiqu s was pivotal to Napoleon's defeat. (Mar.)