She’s a polymath watchmaker based in Birmingham’s historic Jewellery Quarter. Her day job is making and restoring mechanical masterpieces in partnership with her husband, Mr Craig Struthers – entirely by hand, from scratch.

Here, Dr Struthers serves up a gripping history of timekeeping that starts with the personal, but then embarks upon a journey spanning centuries of modern humanity, examining how timepieces have shaped us – not just in service to our quotidian lives, but politically and economically, too. With a scope that reaches from prehistoric 40,000-year-old bone etchings recording lunar cycles to the Dutch horological “forgeries” of her thesis, it is all addressed with a lightness of touch that has seen Dr Struthers’ debut scoring “Book of the Week” on BBC Radio 4.

There were Professors Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking with their clever blockbusters, The Selfish Gene and A Brief History Of Time, respectively. But then came a little-known science reporter for The New York Times, Ms Dava Sobel, who found herself inexplicably sat atop The Sunday Times’ bestseller list for months in 1996 – the wildcard of 1990s pop-sci literature.

Inexplicable only until you grabbed yourself a copy and found yourself lost in the original horological romp of our time: her account of how a clock-making Yorkshireman, Mr John Harrison, found himself up against the star-gazing noblemen of London in securing £20,000 from 1714’s Board of Longitude and ultimately saving countless lives at sea by enabling navigation east-to-west, using a precise on-board chronometer.

Rip-roaringly written, and infuriating in its account of the British government’s self-regarding obtuseness, Longitude: The True Story Of A Lone Genius Who Solved The Greatest Scientific Problem Of His Time was enough to inspire a BBC TV drama starring Sir Michael Gambon as Harrison.

See also Mr Jonathan Betts’ 2006 book Time Restored, which documents the Royal Observatory’s mission to save Harrison’s four trailblazing marine chronometers from the scrap heap in the 1920s and reanimate them for all to admire. They are now ticking along in London’s Greenwich Park, where longitude’s zero-degree Meridian line is bolted in brass.

“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.” As vague as the blurb may have it, the experience of reading this book enlightens the reader as to how inherently vague time really is – and how personal it is. If you know that strange phenomenon when you glance at your wrist and the seconds hand appears to hover for far more than a second, you know.

From the pen of Mr Simon Garfield, the garlanded author whose Just My Type had us all bound in collective gravitas over Comic Sans. Here, Garfield contextualises in terms of the drawn-out horrors of war, captured at the click of a shutter by Mr Robert Capa; or dogged determination at the feet of Sir Roger Bannister, who would live out the same four minutes over a lifetime.

Like Dr Struthers, Mr Nicholas Foulkes charts our intellectual and societal necessity to record time – from the palaeolithic era to a 3,500-year-old water clock at Karnak, all the way up to the Swiss tycoons who industrialised time itself. And, like Garfield, illustrates humanity itself in the process.

As you’d expect from the luxury watch industry’s pre-eminent scribe – official biographer of Patek Philippe no less – Foulkes articulates man’s increasingly exacting trajectory by focusing on exemplar developments, with characteristic facility for the anecdotal. In equally characteristic fashion, he indulges the reader with some of the most lavish exercises in horology. From Dent and Dennison’s world-reference Big Ben, to ever-cultish Rolex and even the a Roman emperor who built a clock into a ship that fired a cannon to summon guests to dinner.

Ms Jeanette Winterson’s first novel for children is inventive, ambitious and challenging. As you’d expect from one of our era’s true greats. Yet, for her in particular, refreshingly leavened, in service to its shorter audience.

A lot is packed into 400-odd pages, charting ancient Egypt to a planet somewhere in the future, with the space-time continuum barely holding things together. Time Tornadoes are causing havoc, and a Woolly Mammoth has been seen on the banks of the River Thames. But in a house called Tanglewreck lives a girl called Silver and a family treasure in the form of a 17th-century watch called the Timekeeper, the key to all this change. Give the gift of time and all its wonder to your next generation. (Then find yourself stealing it back.)

Straddling the Jetsons-esque design sensibility of the late 1950s to the 1970s, this unusual collection brings together have the prime Stateside advocate for retro-futurist timekeeping in collaboration with British alt-sartorialist in Mr Mitch Greenblatt and Mr Josh Sims, respectively.

“In early September 2001,” confides Greenblatt, whose illustration career morphed into one designing watches of his own creation under his brand Xeric, “I was in Utrecht visiting Pieter Doensen, who displayed a phenomenal collection that led to his book, Watch – History Of The Modern Wristwatch. I could barely contain myself.”

Greenblatt’s own collection is now documented in this book; what sets it aside from any other is the focus on not just the era, but the downright bizarre creations that mainstream watch collecting has forgotten. Keenly informed by infectious fanboy passion, this is the perfect answer to anyone who thinks they have seen everything the watch world has to offer.

Mr Matthew Hranek is a noted watch collector and fixture of the NYC men’s style scene. He is therefore well-placed to travel the world conducting first-hand interviews, ultimately revealing the never-before-told stories of 76 certain watches.

This beautifully designed book is complete with original photography of each piece, including the watch Mr Paul Newman wore every single day for 35 years, thereby nicknaming the most covetable Rolex chronograph variant until his death in 2008 and provoking a $17.8m sale in 2017. Or what about President Franklin Roosevelt, who wore an elegant gold Tiffany watch, gifted to him by a friend on his birthday, which was present at the Yalta Conference where he shook the hands of Mr Joseph Stalin and Sir Winston Churchill.

A lavishly photographed tome from ex-Sotheby’s watch veteran Mr Alexander Barter. This is all you need to understand how, from the dawn of the 20th century, the watch began to evolve at breakneck speed – almost entirely in terms of style.

There’s the cataclysmic events of the 1929 Wall Street Crash that unexpectedly led to a golden age of watchmaking. Then the electronic watch – both tuning-fork “hummers” and quartz “tickers” – which almost destroyed the traditional industry in the 1970s, yet led to today’s renaissance.

Somewhere in between, however, Switzerland underwent a funkadelic design upheaval purely for the sake of it, establishing once and for all that telling the time had become merely part of the story.

Every Swiss grand maison has been guilty of lavish vanity publishing, turning press release into art form. However, in spite of first impressions, this book is most definitely not that. Aside from the extensive use of official brand imagery, it really does do what it says on the tin, making “comprehensive” an understatement by comparison to contemporaries.

At 352 pages in large format, covering as many as 90 modern brands, this is a beautiful but highly informative addition to any coffee table, which even the most long-in-the-tooth will have to concede. It’s written from the epicentre of modern horology’s renaissance, a febrile time that saw storied marques emerging from the doldrums, blinking in the daylight, still unthreatened by the imminent rise of mechanical watches’ next threat, the smart wearable.

From the multi-axis tourbillion, to the split-second chronograph, to the sidereal sky chart, The Wristwatch Handbook displays all forms of Swiss genius as comprehensively as a grande complication.