Timekeepers, 9781782113218
Paperback
Our obsession with time: illuminating stories of control and madness.

Timekeepers

how the world became obsessed with time

$25.48

  • Paperback

    368 pages

  • Release Date

    25 July 2017

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Summary

Timekeepers: Stories of Obsession and Our Craziest Hour

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 ou…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781782113218
ISBN-10:1782113215
Author:Simon Garfield
Publisher:Canongate Books
Imprint:Canongate Books
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:368
Release Date:25 July 2017
Weight:255g
Dimensions:200mm x 132mm x 23mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

Timekeepers by Garfield is an entertaining foray into how we’ve tried to control time or find meaning within it.

Digressive, gossipy, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining * * The Sunday Times * *Thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating … Stuffed with fascinating material * * Observer * *A sort of museum between hard covers. Timekeepers is as good as pop history gets * * Sunday Express * *Time well spent … Simon Garfield has made his name as an author who can spin fascinating narratives out of subjects that seem, on the face of it, narrow to the point of being dull * * Financial Times * *Scholarly but jokey, with a magpie’s appetite for glittering trivia, Garfield is as eager to amuse as to inform, and achieves both * * Telegraph * *An eclectic collection of explorations of our relationships with time . . . Very readable * * The Times * *Delightful * * Sunday Telegraph * *Delightful … Gloriously funny … Garfield has an astonishing capacity for meticulous research and a wonderful ability to select the best stories to entertain us * * Daily Express * *Engaging … Engrossing * * Mail on Sunday * *In this book, brilliant cultural historian Simon Garfield assembles a host of intriguing characters who have tried to bend time to their own rules, and questions how we came to be ruled by something so arbitrary * * Elle * *

About The Author

Simon Garfield

Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map, Just My Type and Mauve. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize.

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