About Myself

Liam McIlvanney

  • The Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg by Karl Miller
    Faber, 401 pp, £25.00, August 2003, ISBN 0 571 21816 4
  • Altrive Tales by James Hogg, edited by Gillian Hughes
    Edinburgh, 293 pp, £40.00, July 2003, ISBN 0 7486 1893 7

On a winter’s evening in 1803, James Hogg turned up for dinner at the home of Walter Scott. The man his host liked to call ‘the honest grunter’ was shown into the drawing-room, where a pregnant Mrs Scott was resting on a sofa. Unsure of the protocol in these toney surroundings, and deciding to take his cue from the hostess, Hogg flopped onto an adjoining sofa, smirching the chintz with his dung-spattered boots. In this position, according to J.G. Lockhart in his Life of Scott, Hogg ‘afforded plentiful merriment to the more civilised part of the company’.

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[*] Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (John Murray, 436 pp., £20, August 2003, 0 7195 5446 2).

†John Barrell wrote about the first three volumes in the LRB (22 February 1996). The Queen’s Wake, edited by Douglas Mack and Meiko O’Halloran, is the most recent volume (Edinburgh, 470 pp., £40, July, 0 7486 1617 9).