Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

By the bestselling author of Just My Type: a "thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating" journey into the concept of time "stuffed with fascinating material" (Observer, UK). Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalize it and make it meaningful. In this fascinating, anecdotal exploration, award-winning author Simon Garfield has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.

Here, Garfield explores the nature of time through stories such as: the Beatles learning to be brilliant in an hour and a half; an Englishman arriving back from Calcutta, refusing to adjust his watch; Beethoven's symphonic wishes being ignored; a US Senator's speech that goes for 25 hours; the horrors of war frozen at the click of a camera; a woman who designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar; Roger Bannister living out the same four minutes over a lifetime; and a who prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.

"Digressive, gossipy, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining."—The Sunday Times, UK

© 2016 Canongate Books (Ebook): 9781782113201

Release date

Ebook: 29 September 2016