Like many people (E.M.Forster among them) he found a special pleasure in discovering Samuel Butler's Erewhon.

像很多人一样（比如E.M.福斯特），艾伦读塞缪尔.勃特勒的《埃万共和国》，得到了很多乐趣。

Here was a Victorian writer who had doubted the moral axioms, playing with them in Looking-Glass fashion by attaching the taboos on sex to the eating of meat, describing Anglican religion in terms of transactions in ornamental money, and exchanging the associations of 'sin' with those of 'sickness'.

这是一位维多利亚时代作家，他用爱丽丝镜中奇遇的手法戏弄道德公理。

Alan also much admired Butler's successor Bernard Shaw, enjoying his light play with serious ideas.

艾伦也非常欣赏勃特勒的继承人萧伯纳，欣赏他富有深刻内涵的娱乐剧。

For the well-read sophisticate of the 1930s, Butler and Shaw were already out-worn classics, but for one from Sherborne School they still held a liberating magic.

对于30年代见过世面的人们来说，勃特勒和萧伯纳已经是老朽的经典，但对于一个刚从舍尔伯尼走出来的人来说，他们拥有一种解放的魔力。

Shaw had taken up what Ibsen* called 'the revolution of the Spirit', and wanted to show true individuals on the stage, those who lived not by 'customary morals' but by inner conviction.

萧伯纳认同易卜生（艾伦也同样认为易卜生的戏剧非常出色）所说的精神革命，要在舞台上表现真实的人，那种不靠正统道德，而是依靠内心信念的人。

But Shaw also asked hard questions about what kind of society could contain such true individuals: questions highly pertinent to a young Alan Turing.

但是萧伯纳也提出了一个难题：什么样的社会能够包容这样真实的人？

Back to Methuselah, which Alan thought 'a very good play' in May 1933, was an attempt at what Shaw called 'politics sub specie aeternitatis'.

这个问题，问到了年轻的艾伦.图灵心里去。1933年5月，艾伦觉得《千岁人》非常好，

With its science-fiction view of Fabian ideas, treating with contempt the sordid realities of Asquith and Lloyd George,

这部戏带着费边主义的科幻色彩，讽刺首相阿斯奎和和洛伊德.乔治。

it suited Alan's idealist frame of mind.

这与艾伦的理想主义思想，产生了深深的共鸣。