Perceptions of time have shifted greatly over the years and many of the novels I have read recently reflect a renewed concern with their passage. Anthony Powell's Cycle A Dance to the Music of Time is one example. Its title, taken from Poussin's painting, evokes the universal inability to control life's unfolding rhythm. Powell's work even includes a brief portrait of my predecessor in History Today, Peter Quennell.

Yet the novel that illuminates our era most, indeed, time itself - is one I revisited after more than a decade, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It was written in a crisis and doubt. It was published in1942 between two European catastrophes and after a pandemic. The very idea of fixed time had been unsettled by Einstein's 1905 Theory of Relativity, which gave scientific weight to earlier philosophical explorations.

The novel follows Hans Castrop, a young marine engineer with a modest private income. He visits his tubercular cousin at the International Sanatorium above Davos. "Can one narrate time itself?", Castrope wonders. Planning to stay for three weeks, he instead remains for seven years. Life in the sanatorium alters his sense of time's tempo. Why hurry back to work when one can wander the mountains with cosmopolitans, pursue romance and explore art, the occult and the natural world? Doctors are happy to offer medical justification for his extended retreat and to separate him from his money but withdrawal has limits. Reality, Mann suggested, can be postponed only so long. The novel ultimately raises a question that resonates strongly today. Reality can not be put off forever.