Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time

Time, once passive, is now aggressive. It dominates our lives in ways that the earliest clockmakers would have surely found unbearable. We believe that time is running away from us. Technology is making everything faster, and because we know that things will become faster in the future, it follows that nothing is fast enough now… We have brought this cauldron of rush upon ourselves. Time seems faster because we have made it so.

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.

The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours.

The horrors of war are frozen at the click of a camera.

A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister lives out the same four minutes over a lifetime. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.

Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.

‘Garfield is an engaging writer who has stuffed Timekeepers with some fascinating material… thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating. Timely, you could even say.’ – Guardian