Catland

'Kathryn Hughes is one of our best loved and most incisively witty social historians. Louis Wain, whose anthropomorphised kitties brought the lowly English mouser prancing into the parlours, bedrooms and even ballrooms of England, provides the biographical thread for her brilliantly researched and unforgettable portrait of Victorian times' Miranda Seymour, author of I Used to Live Here Once ‘On Victorian and Edwardian terrain, Hughes is near-omniscient. She knows that the best Victorian cat litter came from Japan and could be purchased at a shop in Holborn, that Siamese cats were first introduced to Britain at the 1871 Crystal Palace cat show, that six billion postcards were sent between 1902 and 1910 and that one, featuring a Wain cat, found its way to Winston Churchill … Through humour elegance and sheer knowledge, Hughes builds something remarkable’ Oliver Soden, Literary Review 'Consistently fascinating … A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist' Kirkus, starred review ‘In Catland, Kathryn Hughes combines ingenuity, insight, and immense literary charm in a study of cat culture and modernism. A perfect gift for cat lovers, art lovers, and readers of all persuasions’ Elaine Showalter, Princeton University ‘Catland is a one-off, a book of high whimsy and deep research, a work of great subtly that is also startlingly original. Part-biography, part-social history, Catland is its own breed of historical investigation. Kathryn Hughes shows us not how we see ourselves, or even how we see our cats, but how we see ourselves in our cats, for better or worse, or in T.S. Eliot’s case, better or verse’ Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire