Powys's diaries are as compulsively readable as Lawrence's letters; they are so clearly the groundwork, in both authors, of all their other writings; and with the same kind of personality informing them, very different as the two personalities are. Powys was a natural diarist, like Kilvert, inhabiting the daily form with the same clumsy ease with which his cast of characters inhabit the novels. Only in his Autobiography--a form in which Powys never seemed quite at home--and in some of his didactic and philosophical works, does the Powys personality lose its magical feel of closeness and elusiveness and appear ordinarily self-centred, cranky and prosaic...

But the most real, and as it seems involuntary, achievement of the diary is the gradual creation of the two characters, himself and his beloved, and the way in which their two personalities emerge quite separately, and as it were laboriously, from the vivid but disjected prose, like creatures with wings slowly uncrumpling from a chrysalis.

Powys’s diary is not merely the egotistical ravings of a self-proclaimed genius. It is a moving tribute to the woman who helped to fashion him as a writer. None of the books which he wrote before he met her were any good... Equally, we can salute the T. T.‘s good judgment in despairing of his mad preacher, or bardic wizard side. Not that she was any more sensible than he was. Their shared whimsy, their devotion to their doll Olwen, for example, will not please every reader...

Will this diary, punctiliously edited and cut down to manageable size by the admirable Dr Krissdottir, lead to a Powys revival? Will those who enjoy the novels of Martin (or come to that Kingsley) Amis see the point of making the great imaginative journey through A Glastonbury Romance? It took the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the strong. I fear that John Cowper Powys’s extreme oddness (which made his schooldays at Sherbourne such torture, and which isolated him socially from all but his enormous family and his close circle of friends) will put people off.