From beautiful lyrics to madcap waggery, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's adored lap-dog Flush to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's terrifying Hound of the Baskervilles, and encompassing odes, fables, stories, songs, nursery rhymes and more, Mark Bryant has compiled a wonderfully evocative collection of writing of all kinds on dogs by those who love them.

There are poems from Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Sir Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, William Cowper, Thomas Hardy, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns and Rupert Brooke; humorous pieces by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Ambrose Bierce and Jerome K. Jerome; and other delights from writers such as Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Gilbert White, H. D. Thoreau, Alexandre Dumas, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, the Brothers Grimm, Saki, Johann Wolfang von Goethe, D. H. Lawrence, Leigh Hunt, G. K. Chesterton, Louisa M. Alcott, Marco Polo, R. M. Ballantyne, J. M. Barrie, Benjamin Disraeli, Michel de Montaigne, W. M. Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson, O. Henry and Jack London, among others.

Covering every genre, from humor and fantasy to romance and horror, and drawn from every part of the world, these stories, poems and excerpts from essays, letters, diaries and journals provide a collection to delight any dog-lover.