Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes Fourth Estate, 416 pages, £22
“Welcome to Catland.”So begins this beautifully illustrated, wide-reaching, surprising and often quite moving exploration of the place of our enigmatic feline companions in the modern world.
It is much more than a series of encounters with our whiskered friends. The book centres on a rather tragic figure: Louis Wain. A renowned British artist, his depictions of cats in human-like scenarios featured in adverts, on postcards, on Christmas cards – and much more besides – across the years where the Victorian age gave way to a sparkling new century. Our first encounter, however, with Wain is an unexpected one. We find ourselves in a pauper’s lunatic asylum in the mid-1920s, meeting him once his mind had been lost in the shadows of mental illness.