Making the Cat Laugh collects the various humorous columns that demonstrated just how witty Lynn Truss always was even before she decided to concentrate her formidable intelligence and sharpness on punctuation. Fans of Eats, Shoots & Leaves will recognise the flights of comic invention and exaggeration: what might otherwise be quite conventional pieces about living alone in your 30s with a cat become vivid and original. The self-mockery never becomes self-indulgently masochistic even when she realises, for example, that a friend who had told her to see Batman Returns and remarked that Truss reminds her of Catwoman, is thinking of the batty spinster, not the reborn super-villainous sex-bomb.

There is a visual precision to the jokes here as well as a verbal one--casual remarks about Quentin Tarantino when he was still comparatively obscure have remained accurate and current. This is a collection that passes the standard, but still useful, test for collections of comic journalism: even read in bulk (for example on public transport) it's still funny enough to make you laugh out loud. --Roz Kaveney