Legal deadlines, transport timetables, expiry dates, free time, downtime. Our daily life is governed by a convulsive countdown; with our watches we entertain a relationship of defensive conflict. Already in 1865 the mathematician Lewis Carroll had the Mad Hatter remark in Wonderland : “If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him. He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock”. The frenetic idea of time as a natural object that eludes us is the outcome of the interweave of multiple narratives, from the religious story to that of technical inventions, from the development of astrology to physics, biology and psychology. In fast-paced pages, Pietro Redondi retraces the concept of time, and explores its measurement and depiction in the history of culture, art and Western literature.