The lively and illuminating story of a vital tool that has powered the working world

'Reveals fascinating truths about history - my favourite kind of book' SATHNAM SANGHERA 'A delightful and moving account of our efforts to capture the truth as it speeds by' TIM HARFORD A secret script? A memory-boosting tool? What exactly is shorthand? Cicero's scribe invented it. Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens and even Astrid Lindgren used it. Rivalries, adulteries and actual martyrdoms arose from it. Spycraft was reliant on it, courtroom dramas were changed by it, and feminism has an uneasy debt to it. But today, its continuing existence is at risk. So, what exactly is shorthand? What has it given us? And what would we lose if this world-changing technology disappeared? Andrew Hill follows the story from the scribes of Ancient Rome to today's takeover of AI, revealing how a system of symbols invented to speedily transcribe speech shaped the modern world and can still offer a valuable way to record, store and recall our brightest ideas today.

"Brisk, ingenious and full of intriguing loops and turns. This is a witty, wonderfully compressed history of an art that helped write the modern world." - Rogues, Widows and Orphans

"Shorthand, a system of fast writing that uses lines and simple signs, used to be almost as ubiquitous in offices as computer software is today. Now, says Hill, the FT's senior business writer, it is mostly a pithy way of summing up a subject. He argues that we might be carelessly discarding a precious tool" - Financial Times