A young veterinary surgeon begins to practise in the remote Yorkshire Dales in 1937, treating abscesses in horses' hooves and milk fever in cows and prescribing diets for overfed lap dogs.

It hardly sounds like the stuff of bestsellerdom. But James Herriot's first book, All Creatures Great and Small (first published in Britain in 1970 under the title If Only They Could Talk), and the seven books that followed became enormous hits worldwide, selling over 60 million copies by the time the author – whose real name was James Alfred Wight – died in 1995.