High-speed trains, planes and automobiles are increasingly redundant

Should the world be faster or slower? This is a question relevant to global economics, politics and culture. But not to Martin Roach. The History of Speed is a one-dimensional book — if it has any dimensions at all.

Speed and pace are often confused. One is distance over time, the other is time over distance. A snail’s pace is actually a snail’s speed, or about 0.002 mph. At the other extreme is the speed of light: 671,000,000 mph. The shelled gastropod is nearer to the average speed of London traffic today, about 7 mph if you are lucky.

Roach, who has written bestsellers on boy bands, suffers no sort of confusion over his subject. Indeed, his focus is hard and sharp. The History of Speed is singularly dedicated to kinematics, especially those concerning wheeled vehicles. Richard ‘Thrust’ Noble, for a long time a Battling Brit with a jet-powered land-speed record, has written the foreword, and the dedication is to Jessi Combs, the Fastest Woman on Earth — at least until last year, when she died after her front wheel collapsed at 522.783 mph in Oregon’s Alvord Desert.

Food and sex are the only two things that matter in life, says Carlo Petrini, and both are better done slowly

It was Galileo who first measured speed scientifically. Until then it seems not to have occurred to anybody to take much interest in what is technically defined as the magnitude of change in a body’s position. Going fast can be disorientating. Both Dr Johnson and Aldous Huxley feared physiological or psychological disintegration at speeds which today we regard as unexceptional.