Focusing on figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and the World War One poets, <i>The Hardy Tree</i> examines power, oppression and individual rights in ways that reverberate through our lives today. Uniting these themes is the issue of communication—the various methods and codes we use to reach one another. The book is arranged in four sections. The first visits Vladimir Nabokov as a child with alphabet blocks, Alan Turing at eleven writing home from boarding...