Electric shepherd : a likeness of James Hogg

With no schooling after the age of seven, Hogg struggled to form his own letters and taught himself the violin to while away the lonely hours working with his flock.

Yet he went on to number literary giants such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Walter Scott among his friends and acquaintances, to become a poet and novelist and to run a short-lived literary magazine called "Spy", the tone of which proved too robust for polite Edinburgh society.

Having fathered two children, he married for the first time aged 50, to a woman 20 years his junior.

Karl Miller's biography restores this overlooked figure to his rightful place in the literary history of Scotland.