For some reason, no opening of any novel I have ever read has stuck in my mind in the way that this has:

From Waterloo Station to the small country town of Ramsgard in Dorset is a journey of not more than three or four hours, but having by good luck found a compartment to himself, Wolf Solent was able to indulge in such an orgy of concentrated thought, that these three or four hours lengthened themselves out into something beyond all human measurement.

It is the first sentence of Wolf Solent (1929), by John Cowper Powys (1872–1963), a man who, as well as being a novelist, was also a poet, critic, philosopher, controversialist, eccentric, mystic, anarchist, and, to earn a living for much of his life, peripatetic lecturer. His peripeteia took him around not his native England (he was born in Derbyshire, the son of a clergyman, raised in Somerset, where his father was the incumbent of the parish of Montacute, and educated in Dorset and at Cambridge) but the United States of America, where he lived for almost thirty years. He wrote Wolf Solentmainly while living in New York City, finishing it in a remote part of upstate New York. Even today Powys would be regarded as decidedly extraordinary; a hundred years ago he was perceived as being somewhere on a scale from bohemian to barking mad. His output was prodigious, despite his not publishing the first of his sixteen novels until he was