Cats' X.Y.Z. by Beverley Nichols (Timber Press, £14.99)

TO those of a certain age the name of Nichols will be familiar.

A name from an age of not-quite-so-political-correctness. An age of infant television before it turned into the enfant terrible in the corner. An age of Empire and of Godfrey Winn hosting Housewives Choice every weekday morning on the Light programme.

Nichols was a novelist, dramatist and lyricist; a prolific writer on a diverse number of subjects, but nothing occupied his mind so much as gardening and cats. In his many books, there were always cats.

Last year, Timber Press reprinted his Cats' A.B.C. and now comes the companion Cats' X.Y.Z. - the further adventures of his trio of feline friends, Four, Five and Oscar.

Four prefers soda water to milk and has an excellent cure for insomnia.

Five is sceptical of outsiders, thanks to an unfurtunate encounter with a Pekinese, but is pretty enough to attract unwanted attention from the neighbourhood toms.

Oscar, the youngest and most energetic of the three, is a pushover for affection and eats like a horse.

In her foreward, Juliet Clutton-Brock, reminds us that "Beverley Nichols had no problem with the certain knowledge that his cats were as self-aware as he was, and he found every opportunity in his writing to express his horror of cruelty and his distaste for the circuses and zoos of the time"... so, we have a man whose thoughts, then considered so widely off-beam, would be wholeheartedly embraced today.

Nichols' world is a world of F and non-F - the feline (Chopin, Rubens, even bulldogs and poodles); and the non-feline (Bach, fox terriers and the "the least F dog" the corgi).

As in A.B.C. we have 26 amusing topics, one for each letter of the alphabet, taking the feline point of view... A for Autumn; B for Backwater; C for Cottage etc.

In Heat, Nichols tells of once staying with Sir Compton MacKenzie (he who is probably rotating in his grave with what the BBC has done to Monarch of the Glen) on his Hebredian island, to be greeted by four elderly Siamese cats all warming their bottoms on top of a hot stove.

"It was a most impressive moment in one's life," he records.

In Kittens, Nichols observes: "It will be generally agreed that babies, when compared with kittens, are very unnattractive creatures. The chief objection to babies is that they are insane".

Cats' X.Y.Z. was first published in 1961 - seven years before Nichols' death - with orginal drawings by Derrick Sayers.

The anecdotes are gentle, astute and sometimes pithy. They provide perfect reading for a winter's afternoon in front of a roaring fire, with maybe a cat or two, curled up on your lap.

David Chapman