TIME truly is flying by. Yesterday to some of us, is ancient history to others.

The press release for this absorbing look at everyday life asks: "Did you know the Brits' reputation for queuing only developed after the Second World War (helped perhaps by wartime food rationing)?'' Well, yes, actually there are still one or two of us around, even born after the war, who knew that.

You didn't? Let's move on a decade or two. "Did you know In the 1960s women in offices could demand a modesty board' to stop the boss peering at their legs"? Ah, I thought you did. But perhaps it is news to you, like this reviewer, that the board has vanished.

What a revelation.

But there's much here that many will not know, yet will probably find fascinating.

The frozen meal, for instance, was devised in 1953 by an executive of an Omaha food company, to use up 270 tons of turkey left over from the Thanksgiving holiday. In 1986 an imprint of the original tray designed for the frozen meal, marketed as a TV dinner, was set in Hollywood's Walk of Fame. The tray itself was donated to the US's August Smithsonian Institute museum.

What of Britain? Joe Moran, a reader in cultural history at Liverpool's John Moores University, reports: "It did not take long for imitations (of the US frozen meal) to arrive." Introduced in 1955, Bird's Eye fish fingers became, in 1962, the first frozen food listed in the Retail Price Index.

Drinking, smoking, office life (when and why did the water cooler replace the tea break?) shopping, travel - all this and much more, amounting to what the book's subtitle calls "the story of daily life from breakfast to bedtime", is engagingly chronicled.

And there are many genuine surprises.

Moran reveals: "The mythology of the full English breakfast only really developed as this tradition was dying out."

How and when did the bowl of cornflakes displace bacon and eggs? Read on, soon discovering that breakfast cereals also ushered in the concept of "promotional packaging".