Catland : Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World

'Part-biography, part-social history, Catland is its own breed of historical investigation' Amanda ForemanSome called it a craze.

To others it was a cult. Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with cats and ushered in a new era.'He invented a whole cat world' declared H.

G. Wells of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist whose anthropomorphic kittens made him a household name.

His drawings were irresistible but Catland was more than the creation of one eccentric imagination.

It was an attitude - a way of being in society while discreetly refusing to follow its rules.As cat capitalism boomed in the spectacular Edwardian age, prize animals changed hands for hundreds of pounds and a new industry sprung up to cater for their every need.

Cats were no longer basement-dwelling pest-controllers, but stylish cultural subversives, more likely to flaunt a magnificent ruff and a pedigree from Persia.

Wherever you found old conventions breaking down, there was a cat at the centre of the storm.Whether they were flying aeroplanes, sipping champagne or arguing about politics, Wain's feline cast offered a sly take on the restless and risky culture of the post-Victorian world.

No-one experienced these uncertainties more acutely than Wain himself, confined to a mental asylum while creating his most iconic work.

Catland is a fascinating and fabulous unravelling of our obsession with cats, and the man dedicated to chronicling them.