The nine lives of Cats: how poetry became a musical, then a film …
Published as war broke out in 1939, TS Eliot's Book of Practical Cats outsold The Waste Land. The 1980s saw a West End smash. Will the new film speak to us today? When Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats appeared in the first week of October 1939, it might have been thought that its author had lost the plot. It was only 17 years since TS Eliot had published The Waste Land, his cryptic lament for the moral and psychic…