We have a fine crop of Christmas gift books this year, so good that some of them actually qualify as real books. This is a rare and beautiful thing.
What Cats Want (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is by Dr Yuki Hattori, billed here as ‘Japan’s leading cat doctor’, as though anyone is going to argue with that. It’s simply a guide to understanding your cat — clear, concise, very pleasingly designed and with some lovely, quintessentially Japanese illustrations, mainly of cats. Of course, if you don’t like cats it’s really not going to help you very much; but for those of us who are at least partially obsessed by these beautiful, mysterious, bird-butchering, bum-licking creatures who don’t think they are masters of the house, but know it for certain, this is a delightful and genuinely useful little book. The illustrations, by the way, are by the unfeasibly named Ito Hamster.
‘Lalochezia’ is a Greek word meaning the use of foul language to alleviate stress, unhappiness, pain or frustration
Word Perfect (John Murray, £14.99)
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