A cat knows how to be comfortable, how to get the people around it to serve it. In a tranquil domestic situation, the cat is a veritable manipulative genius. It seeks the soft, it seeks the warm, it prefers the quiet and it loves to be full. It displays, when it gets its own way in these matters, a degree of contentment we would all like to emulate.

Why cat were given such terrific peripheral vision when they spend so much time looking down their noses is difficult to understand.

We are the ones who have high blood pressure, ulcers, and heart attacks, not cats.

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows.

Anyone who has owned many cats in long succession can define his or her life as a series of furry episodes.