[It] is no great exaggeration to describe almost all of J. C. Powys's creative work—and some of his critical work too—under the one heading of autobiography. It is not merely in the volume with that title that he reveals himself in all his paradoxical mixture of genuine insight and self-confessed charlatanry. There has always been, by his own admission, a touch of the theatrical about John Cowper Powys: 'There is no use trying to conceal the fact', he writes in the Autobiography, 'that Nature from the start had made me an actor.' From youth onward, he has relished his own performance, often observing it, however, with a satirical smile, not altogether taken in by the act but grateful, so to speak, for his privileged seat in the front row. His own complex personality, the various masks he has assumed at different periods of his life...