Timekeepers

Canongate 368pp £16.99

The Week Bookshop £12.99

“There was a time when we weren’t so particular about time,” said Damian Whitworth in The Times. Before the mid 19th century, differences in sunrise and sunset meant that “clocks in Oxford ran five minutes behind London time, and those in Exeter lagged by 14 minutes”. Then the railways arrived, and with them the need for time to be standardised. “The modern age of timekeeping was born.” As Simon Garfield suggests in this “very readable” book, time now “dominates our lives in ways the earliest clockmakers would surely have found unbearable”. “Time” is now the most used noun in the English language. We are obsessed with measuring it. Where we once looked up at the sky for “vague and moody guidance”, we now take “atomically precise cues from our phones and computers”.

Garfield has always been an “exuberant truffle-hound of the recondite”, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. (His backlist includes studies of fonts and maps.) Timekeepers is full of “delightful” factoids. For centuries, Britain and most of Europe had different calendars, the Julian and the Gregorian, which were 11 days apart. Britain finally switched to the European in 1752, jumping “straight from 2 to 14 September, to considerable public unrest – and a lot of missed birthday presents, presumably”. After the 1789 Revolution, the French briefly useed a decimalised 24-hour clock, and renamed the months and days after elements of nature. “October became Brumaire (foggy), 24 October became the Poire of Brumaire (the pear of foggy).” For a book about time, Timekeepers has a “slack attitude to chronology”, and there are too many lists and footnotes, said Katy Guest in the Financial Times. Still, if you’re into “watches, trains and fancy-that facts”, spending a few hours in its company will be “time well spent”.