On Cats

This beautiful gift book contains a selection of essays, stories and poems on cats, by writers from across the centuries. Cats have been worshipped, adored, and mistrusted in equal measure.In these pages, writers reflect on the curious feline qualities that inspire such devotion in their owners, even when it seems one-sided. Cats’ affections are hard-won and often fickle. Freud considered his cat an embodiment of true egoism; Hilaire Beloc found peace in his feline companion’s complacency; and Hemingway – a famous cat-lover – wrote of drinking with his eleven cats and the pleasant distraction they gave him. Edward Gorey can’t turn down a stray despite the trouble they cause him, and admits he has no idea what they’re thinking about; Muriel Spark gives practical advice on how to teach a cat to play ping-pong; Sylvia Plath describes the archetype ‘cat lady’ in her famous poem ‘Ella Mason and her Eleven Cats’; Nikola Tesla, who helped design the modern electricity supply system, describes a seminal experience with a cat that first sparked his fascination with electricity; Clea Simon reflects on the mysterious connection between women and cats; VS Naipaul discovers, on adopting a stray, that ‘around this simple love of cats was a whole culture I knew nothing about’. These writers, and many others, paint a joyful portrait of cats and their mysterious and loveable ways. As Hemingway wrote, ‘one cat leads to another’.