About Time: A History Of Civilization In Twelve Clocks

David Rooney Viking £16.99 ★★★★★

What the time is depends on where you are: when it’s noon for you, it’s already 1pm in, say, Venice. It used to vary in different parts of the UK: the sun is at its highest in Lowestoft before the same happens in Aberystwyth, so there was no reason for the respective town hall clocks to show noon at the same time.

I had previously believed that it was trains that put a stop to this – so that passengers could avoid adjusting their watches at every station. David Rooney digs deeper in this history of timekeeping and tells us that local time in fact persisted alongside ‘railway time’ until Victorian moralists keen that every pub should obey very precise licensing hours imposed Greenwich Mean Time across the land. But Greenwich no longer tells the world what time it is. The time we’ve now all agreed is ‘the’ time is set by a constellation of satellites carrying sturdy functional boxes called atomic clocks.

GPS – ‘Global Positioning System’ – time is heeded by your phone and mine, and most modern vehicles, machines and infrastructure.

Most of the 12 clocks of this book’s subtitle are older and prettier, and ‘clock’ here can mean any kind of timepiece. There are hourglasses. There are sundials, including the 88ft monster in Jaipur known as The Supreme Instrument, so large that you can watch its shadow move.

This is a beguiling book that shifts enjoyably between the barely fathomable nature of time and historical anecdote.