I am not normally in the business of reviewing movies, but I found “The Imitation Game” particularly moving. If you don’t know about it, it is about Alan Turing, logician and cryptologist and one of the 20th Century’s outstanding geniuses. He and his team cracked the Nazi naval Enigma Code during the Second World War, shortened the war, and almost single-handedly created the whole concept of the computer.

Turing is of particular interest to me because he was an exact contemporary of my father’s at school. Somewhere I have a photograph of him in a school group with my father, who described him as a loner, outsider, a socially inept boy who nevertheless carried off almost every prize in a school besotted with sport and thinking little of academic brilliance. He was also an excellent runner, but this didn’t save him from the bullies.

The most disgusting form of that bullying still went on when I was there involved putting some vulnerable small boy bottom down in a tea chest. Ink, glue and other things were poured on the boy’s head. Then a table was placed over the top of the chest. When the child was sufficiently hysterical the chest would be manhandled onto the top of a tower of tea chests, which swayed backwards and forwards. (Turing is shown in the film as being imprisoned under some floorboards, but maybe they couldn’t show the real thing for good health and safety reasons). Despite this, Turing went on to help defeat Hitler, save millions of lives and create a new industry.

As for the other kind of bullying shown in the movie – of people born homosexual whether they wanted to be or not – words fail me. At last that has largely stopped as well, except in parts of the world where crude and cruel forms of religion still persist.

Benedict Cumberbatch does a spectacular and wholly believable job as Turing. Oscar stuff.