Timekeepers

Timekeepers collects twenty-one loosely connected stories about how time went from something people read off the sun to something that dominates modern life. Simon Garfield ranges across two and a half centuries, covering the arrival of standardized railway time, Beethoven's disputes over tempo, a designer's attempt to reinvent the clock and calendar during the French Revolution, and Roger Bannister's obsessive pursuit of the four-minute mile.

Written in Garfield's characteristically wry, anecdote-driven style, the book asks how humans came to feel perpetually short on the one resource everyone is given in equal measure.