On a recent Saturday, Chipping Norton, a small village in the English Cotswalds, hosted a literary festival that included such discussion topics as “Shag, Shoot, or Marry,” which weighed the relative merits of Heathcliff, Lord Rochester, and Mr. Darcy.

Another heroic British character made an appearance: Sir Roger Bannister, a neurologist and the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. On Tuesday, that achievement turns sixty years old; Bannister is now eighty-five. He had travelled a half hour from his Oxford home to speak about his new memoir, “Twin Tracks,” at a small Methodist chapel.

Bannister entered from the rear of the church, leaning on crutches with forearm supports that bunched his black suit sleeves. (Days later, he would reveal to BBC Radio Oxford that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2011.) Addressing the small crowd, he said it was a great irony that, as a clinical neurologist, he was having difficulty walking. He took his seat near an old pipe organ, then unstrapped a black dress watch and placed the timepiece on a table, its face turned away from his.

Fewer people have run a sub-four-minute mile than have climbed Mt. Everest. The current record is just over three minutes and forty-three seconds, though during the talk Bannister flung his long hands up and insisted that runners have only shaved thirteen seconds off his time (three minutes fifty-nine and four-tenths seconds), since the modern surface is worth four seconds in comparison with the cinder track that he had run on. Bannister’s competitive spirit was flickering, and the crowd laughed. He seemed young.

Bannister explained that his failure to win medal in the fifteen hundred metres at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics ignited his two-year quest to break the four-minute mark—a plotline that the producers of “Downton Abbey” recently announced they plan to adapt for a BBC miniseries.

A medical student at Oxford, Bannister took a cerebral approach to the four-minute barrier. He studied running’s physiological demands, measured his own oxygen-consumption levels, and produced papers with titles like “The Carbon Dioxide Stimulus to Breathing in Severe Exercise.” Bannister discovered that running consistent lap times demanded less oxygen than varying the pace. So he focussed on his quarter-mile splits. During lunch breaks, he would run ten of them, stopwatch in hand, punctuated by two-minute breaks. In five months, he brought down the average time he could run these intervals from sixty-three seconds to fifty-nine.

Bannister was racing more than just the clock: two other runners, Wes Santee, an American, and John Landy, Australian, were nearing the four-minute mile. “It all came down to whoever had the first chance in tolerable weather,” Bannister said.

Bannister recalled his trepidation, on the blustery night of May 6, 1954, when Franz Stampfl, his coach, implored him to run in a meet between Oxford and the Amateur Athletic Association: “He said to me, ‘Although the conditions are not ideal, if you don’t take this opportunity, you might not forgive yourself for the rest of your life.’ He was right.”

Bannister had trained just enough. As he crossed the finish line, his vision failed and his blood pressure fell. “I would have collapsed if someone wasn’t there to hold me,” he said. Later, as a doctor, Bannister would study how fainting happens.

Bannister broke the four-minute barrier once more, at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, in August, 1954, and soon after he retired from sport to focus on medicine. In his forty-year career, he researched and diagnosed failures of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions, like heart rate and breathing. He defined several rare disorders and wrote a textbook, now in its fifth edition.

A year after breaking four minutes, Bannister started a family with Moyra, an artist, who was sitting in the front row of the Chipping Norton church, with a shock of curly white hair and a baby-blue shawl. The couple’s four children and fourteen grandchildren are, Bannister said, “all I’m interested in now.”

In 1975, Bannister was involved in a car accident that crushed his ankle. He would never be able to run again. “I remember, as a child, the experience of taking a few steps tentatively, and then I would start running, and then I would feel a sense of magic that suffused my motion,” he said. “That feeling became grafted on to competitive running and stayed with me, even afterward. I never forgot it.”

The talk wrapped after an hour, and the attendees lined up in the center aisle to have their books signed. When each book buyer got to the front of the queue, Bannister would say something, like, “Are you quite interested in sport?” or “Why, you look pretty athletic,” or “You run what distance?” followed by “What’s your time?”

The purchaser of one book identified himself as a watch collector and told Bannister that he was fascinated with the concept of time. That made the runner look slightly befuddled. The collector pointed to Bannister’s wristwatch lying on the table and asked who made it. Bannister said he didn’t know. He allowed the man to pick it up, and the collector twirled it in his hand for half a minute, then said that he didn’t know what it was, either. “I’m confused,” Bannister said. “Is it important?”

Bannister signed books until the line cleared. As the chapel emptied, a man in a festival sash noticed Bannister fumbling with his watch; he stepped up onto the chancel, threaded the strap through its clasp, and handed Bannister his crutches.

Bannister made his way up the aisle to where Moyra stood, and then out to a car that was waiting to take the couple back to their home in Oxford. The man with the sash held open the door and protected Bannister’s head as he took the passenger-side seat. A second or two passed, and then the heels of his black dress shoes lifted from the ground, slowly clearing the car door sill, one by one.

Above: Roger Bannister about to cross the tape at the end of his record-breaking mile run. Photograph by Norman Potter/Central Press/Getty.