Electric Shepherd

Electric Shepherd is a likeness of James Hogg, poet and shepherd, and one of Scotland's most unusual literary figures. With no schooling after the age of seven, Hogg struggled to form his 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 write one of the greatest of all Scottish novels - The Confessions of a Justified Sinner - and to become a leading presence in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh. After a long period of neglect his art was in modern times restored to favour, and to honour. Hogg was, as his novel suggests, two men and more, and Karl Miller's book describes a key cultural moment, when the age of 'personality' (insult, sport, gossip, clandestinity, ambiguity, indirection, exclusion) produced a writer who would translate its social codes into the protean psychology of Romantic selfhood. Electric Shepherd is less an orthodox biography than a remarkable speaking likeness of the whole Hogg, 'the unlikely man who helped give the world "personality" its modern meaning'.

• "Miller's book is a personal account of the poet and personality remembered until now chiefly because of his masterpiece, the Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and the 'Extempore Effusion' that Wordsworth wrote on hearing of his death; Electric Shepherd adds a third permanent memorial." Seamus Heaney
• "Electric Shepherd is a work that nobody else could have written, and is thereby an occasion as much as a book, where a magical and searching writer meets his match on the field of literary endeavour." Andrew O'Hagan, Sunday Telegraph
• "The result is not only absorbing: it suggests other books to be written. Yet I can't believe there will be a better one with Hogg or Hoggs at the centre." Allan Massie, Times Literary Supplement