Description
The highs and lows of being a vet in the Yorkshire Dales are perfectly captured in James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small which contains If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet.
Bulls with sunstroke, pigs on the run and a cake-eating Peke with a betting habit . . . I grew up reading James Herriot's book and I'm delighted that thirty years on they are still every bit as charming, heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny as they were then.
The attraction of Herriot's ever popular memoirs of a country vet . . . is their alternating highs and lows, humour and pathos, and gripping anecdotes about delivering lambs, grumpy farmers, hypochondriac pet-owners, stroppy cows and blunt Yorkshire characters. And, of course, there's a powerful nostalgia element in these stories about our green and pleasant land in the day before the ravages of ribbon development.
Herriot's enchanting tales of life in the Dales are deservedly classics. Full of extraordinary characters, animal and human, the books never fail to delight
On original release in the 1970s, James Herriot's insights into the life of a working vet were so popular and enchanting to readers that the area of the Yorkshire Dales in which he practised became known as 'James Herriot country'.
James Herriot grew up in Glasgow and qualified as a veterinary surgeon at Glasgow Veterinary College. Shortly afterwards he took up a position as an assistant in a North Yorkshire practice where he remained, with the exception of his wartime service in the RAF, until his death in 1995. He wrote many books about Yorkshire country life, including some for children, but he is best known for his memoirs, beginning with If Only They Could Talk. The books were televised in the enormously popular series All Creatures Great and Small.