Canongate Books Timekeepers : How The World Became Obsessed With Time

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.