Time edited by Katinka Ridderbos, Cambridge University Press, £25, ISBN 0521782937 Reviewed by Maggie McDonald
“TIME is on my side,” sang the Rolling Stones, rather a long time ago. Andrew Marvell wouldn’t have agreed. No time for agonisingly slow “vegetable” love, he wrote, not with “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” and over time, our disagreements and bewilderments about what exactly time is have grown. We cannot even agree on the course of time: linear chronology for some, synoptic perception for others. G. J. Whitrow’s magnificent Time in History laid out the wildly varying ways in which different cultures and different ages have perceived time: a perpetual present, for example, or a future…
