Excerpt from The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

* The whole family was kind to dogs. In the first surviving letter written in his own hand, RLS makes affectionate mention of his dog, Coolin. Three years later he is still thinking of the dog when writing to his mother from boarding school: ‘I hope that Coolin is all well and that he will send me another letter.’

Our pedigree was terrifically intact, and our good fortune secure, at the time of my own birth in Aviemore in the kitchen of the tenant farmer Paul Duff. My first owner had imagination galore, a really infectious manner of drumming up knowledge and making up words. He was fierce excellent, a noted Trotskyist, terrible with money,and he – the eager-faced Mr Duff of Aviemore and Kingussie – had a wonderful old Stalinist mother with whom he argued until both were purple in the face. She was in fact a great hero of Red Clydeside, but a posh old bird as well. The family all called her Elephant or Stodge on account of her greed for Madeira cake, potato scones, and Paris buns. Her voice was terribly plummy and even in her old age she still scooped up great ladlefuls of bramble jam. Bless her, though: the old lady loved my own great-grandfather Phiz, and was said to have feathered his basket with a red flag the day after Trotsky was attacked in that Mexican villa. I could never have imagined that one day I would see that place, but we’ll come to that in good time. The Duffs were the first people I ever knew on earth, and I find their habits pretty much cling to me from when I was a suckling, those evenings of argument, with Duff and Stodge ripping the world’s prose to shreds as they spat crumbs across the dining table like bullets at Ypres and threatened liquidation to half the population. I say liquidation, because that was the kind of thing Mrs Duff would say. She couldn’t bear to use the word ‘death’ or ‘dead’, and, consequently, neither can I. She would narrow her excited little eyes as if about to say something deeply shameful, and then say: ‘If anything ever happens to me, the policy book is in the cupboard above the kettle. I’ve taken to policy books. That’s how far we’ve come down. But you have to be careful. Something happened to Mr McIver over the hill and he had to be buried by the Parish.’

‘It wasn’t that something happened,’ said Paul. ‘He died.’

‘Don’t be morbid,’ she said. ‘Those dogs are howling, Paul. I’m sure they’re listening to every word we say.’

The Duffs, mother and son, never had any money, but they were quite grand about it, making do in the old way of farming common to Scotland. I am not saying I sprang out of a dunghill, but my origins were not propitious. A muddy kitchen. A stale parlour. The breeder Paul was a complex man with a love of whisky and a passion for the early European novel.* He would work the fields and read a tome at the wheel of his tractor before returning at sunset with colour in his cheeks, ready to begin drinking himself into a stupor. His favourite actor was Cantinflas. He had watched all those old socialist movies when he lived in Glasgow.

* He liked novelists who got out of doors. Defoe, Smollett,Orwell. He said novelists who didn’t like adventure should take up knitting.

But truly I digress. (And digression is another creed.) Paul was short of a few quid in the spring of 1960, and he sold my entire litter to a gardener from Charleston, Firle, in the province of East Sussex, who liked to travel to Scotland on holiday, looking for dogs and plant cuttings. This was none other than Walter Higgens, full-time husband to my great good friend Mrs Higgens. He had driven up to Scotland to buy pedigree dogs and he found us in Aviemore. It wasn’t far from the place where Mr Grant was born – we each yelped our first notes in the land of midges. The main thing about Mr Higgens was his capacity for listening. We could all talk, after a fashion, and I suppose the Bloomsbury habit was for the endlessly characterful business of talk, a modern version of the classical love of rhetoric. Talking was a thing I took very much for granted, as all animals do, but the vital talent was the one for cocking an ear. Walter Higgens listened to everything and he said little: that was my initial inheritance, on the long drive through the mountains, lowlands, and smoky shires.

Excerpted from The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan. Copyright © 2010 by Andrew O'Hagan. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.