Rebecca works from her studio in the countryside near Stroud (UK), where she lives with her husband and two children.

I know I have read this more times than I have dates for, so this mayn't be surprising, but I wanted there to be more variety. Throughout the 1930s, the family would be the first audience on which Eliot tested out the cat poems, both in letters and on visits to the family's Hampshire cottage. Eliot’s book became a HUGE hit at the theatre, courtesy of ALW, and I have seen the musical countless times, with various age groups.Featuring Macavity, the Mystery Cat; Mr Mistofelees, the Original Conjuring Cat; Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer and all the gang, this is a must for every child’s bookshelf and is a great companion to the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage show. They were collected and published in 1939, with cover illustrations by the author, and quickly re-published in 1940, illustrated in full by Nicolas Bentley. Eliot's poems are the source material for Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats which is what inspired me to pick this up. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. Long before Andrew Lloyd Webber's fabled musical, I read Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to my sons and to one of them just after he was born, though I suspect the readings have had no lasting impact on children so very young.

Okay, after I finished reading this classic, I decided to gird the proverbial loins and watch the Tom Hooper movie for the first time. But I think there is more to this - here you find insight in to the world of T S Eliot- from the source of those rather special names for the cats (and dogs) to the fact that London town would not be the same with out those feline characters making it their own.I was very young and not a fan at poetry at all when I went to see it first and it wasn't until a friend told me recently that I even knew this book existed. Yet Scheffler's drawings are nuanced so that he finds room to make Growltiger sinister, except when he is courting Griddlebone. A very good copy in a lightly toned and soiled jacket with slightly nicked and creased extremities and a couple of minor chips.

Scheffler has produced a marvellous edition, fit to stand alongside the previous illustrated editions of the whole book, and it even compares favourably to the darker-hued Erol LeCain illustrations for five of the poems. I tend to like this better than the Bentley and Gorey editions, and this edition is really well worth it. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The Waste Land, first published in the inaugural issue of The Criterion in October 1922, celebrates its centenary in 2022.Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Now that I've read it, I was quite shocked at how close some of the songs are in the musical to the poetry. This collection is a curious and artful homage to felines young and old, merry and fierce, small and unmistakably round. On 5 June 2009, The Times revealed that in 1937 Eliot had composed a 34-line poem entitled "Cows" for the children of Frank Morley, a friend who, like Eliot, was a director of the publishing company Faber and Faber. Well aware of how awful and derisive the reviews had been, I fortified myself with a good few glasses of shiraz and my TV blanket.