Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World

“Catland is absolutely charming. I hesitate that to use that word famously condemned by Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (“Charm is the great English blight”) but it is. It’s winning, it’s witty. Kathryn Hughes’s tone is colloquial, friendly, amusing, arch, conspiratorial. Using this very intimate perspective, she inveigles you into quite a big idea, the process by which the domestic cat evolved from being a by-word for incestuous verminkind—hardly better than the mouse it hunted—to being both a member of the family, a loved relation, and also a high-status possession.” Read more...

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize

Minoo Dinshaw, Biographer