The first mechanical clocks were made in France in around 1270, and the early mechanical clocks had very low accuracy. The two major advances in accuracy (before the twentieth century) were the cycloidal pendulum clock invented by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s, and the marine chronometer invented by John Harrison in the 1760s. Many historians have declared that in England before the Industrial Revolution the regulation of life by clock time was very rare. But the authors of this book have examined a very wide range of documents, and they show clearly that by the early fifteenth century public clocks in England did regulate the lives of very many people, including illiterate farm workers.

However, this book has many serious errors. The authors tell of Galileo's early experiments on falling bodies which he timed with his pulse, but there is no mention of Galileo's simple but accurate water clock, which he later used for timing balls rolling down an inclined plane. Their account of the extent to which the period of a pendulum varies with the angle of swing is very misleading (p. 2). The assertion that Newton worked in astrology (p. 3) is false. The authors do not understand what the cycloid is, and they confuse it with the lemniscate (pp. 20, 35). Describing the construction of large fourteenth-century clocks as ‘costing maybe 1 million pounds in today's prices’ means absolutely nothing (p. 77). Figure 9.3 describes Mexico City, Calcutta and Beijing as ‘major ports in Spanish and Portuguese territories’ (p. 340).

And there are very many further errors. Galileo ‘seems to have been unaware of the hybrid geo-heliocentric model of the solar system proposed by Tycho Brahe’ (p. 5). But Galileo repeatedly quoted from Brahe in his epoch-making Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632). Ancient Greek mathematicians did not study the cycloid (p. 36), since it was invented in 1501. E.P. Thompson's 1967 paper is described as ‘published over thirty years ago’ (p. 43) – but this book was published forty-two years after that paper. What is meant by ‘examples in use varied up to eight hours’ (p. 143, about hour-glasses)? Figure 5.2 (p. 149) is incomprehensible; and the maps of England in Figures 5.5 (p. 152) and 5.9 (p. 156) have the counties shaded in two different styles, neither of which is explained. In Figure 5.12 the diagram seems to have been produced with coloured symbols to identify the four graphs, but the diagram is printed in black and white, which makes it unreadable (p. 160). Figure 5.13 displays eight graphs, but the caption names only six of them (p. 165). The table in Figure 6.2 (p. 184) has row and column headings, but the data is blank. The editor of John Aubrey's Brief Lives (1982) was not N. Barbor (pp. 189–191, 253, 271, 354 and 364) or R. Barbour (p. 420), but Richard W. Barber. What is meant by ‘original emphasis’ in a quoted passage with no emphasis (p. 354)?

The dust jacket displays a photograph of an elaborate device, which appears to be an indicator for the equation of time, mounted on an astronomical instrument (c. seventeenth century), but nowhere identified. Plate 7 is an eighteenth-century painting of The Poor Widow's Cottage showing a pendulum clock; the artist is not named. Plate 8a shows a dial printed with XII on the left, and Plate 8b shows a dial printed with XII on the right.

There are an excessive number of misprints, some of which are rather confusing. Dr John Arbuthnott's surname is spelt sometimes as Arbuthnott and sometimes as Arbuthnot; e.g. the bibliography lists Arbuthnot, John (1770), Miscellaneous works of the late Dr Arbuthnott (p. 420). The many spelling mistakes include ‘Russia’ for ‘Prussia’ (p. 88), ‘Giovanni Alfanso Bovelli’ for ‘Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’ (p. 93), ‘Johnstone’ for ‘Ben Jonson’ (p. 98), ‘typs’ for ‘types’ (p. 211), ‘Samuel Purches’ for ‘Samuel Purchas’ (p. 288), ‘principal’ for ‘principle’ (p. 288), ‘Meyer’ for ‘Mayer’ (p. 345, three times), ‘and them at’ for ‘and then at’ (p. 364) and ‘Woolsthorp’ for ‘Woolsthorpe’ (p. 364).

The lengthy bibliography (pp. 420–449) has very many errors. Many publications which are cited are not listed, including some cited on pp. 7, 58, 66, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93 and 163. Some titles are misspelt: Engalnd (p. 422), Humanisation (p. 426), Postmoderniam (p. 427), The Shadows at Time for The Shadows of Time (p. 438), The Diary of a West Country Physician, 168–1726 (p. 438), Corosion (p. 442), Chapman for Chapmen (p. 443), Aristardus for Aristarchus (p. 446) and Art of Memory for The Art of Memory (p. 449). Page numberings of articles are inconsistent. Numerous items are printed out of alphabetic order, e.g. Ashmole (1717) then Armstrong (1983) (p. 419). Blackbourn D. (1998) and Blackbourn P. (1993) are both David Blackbourn (p. 421), and Clive Cohen (1982), A Calculating People, is listed twice (p. 424). The name J. Ward is given once, as author of books published in 1715 and 1740 and editor of a book published in 1995.

The brief index (pp. 451–456) is inadequate; e.g. the entry for Lizard Point, Cornwall, references p. 337 but omits the much more significant passage on pp. 282–284. It has serious misspellings: Columbas, Christopher; Newton, Sir Issac; and astralobe. No page numbers are given for Charles I, king of England, or for Whitaker, Jeffery. Edmond Halley's full name is correctly given in the title of Alan H. Cook's excellent biography in the bibliography, but his first name is misspelt as ‘Edmund’ in the Index and everywhere else (pp. 191, 258, 259, 353, 387).

The book is written in an extremely repetitive manner. There are many lengthy quotations from numerous philosophers (mostly postmodern) – only some quotations from Marx seem to say anything significant.

Oxford University Press accepted this book for publication – why did they not get it refereed and sub-edited by some knowledgeable person?