"Professors, psychologists, the frenzied do-gooders and the jangling drop-outs make divergent proclamations," wrote Donald Zec in the Daily Mirror in the autumn of 1968. "But all of them, the swingers and the Simon-pure, are agreed on one devastating fact: Something odd is going on in the state of the universe." One of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of these 1960s symptoms was Brigid Brophy. Novelist, journalist, vegetarian, polymath, pundit and polemicist, she reflected and transmitted the style of the age. A thumbnail sketch in the Observer in 1975 summed her up as a "'terrible child' of the mid-sixties: campaigned against marriage, Vietnam, factory farmers, religious education in schools, for Greek in schools, bisexuality, vegetarianism, Fanny Hill and Writers' Action Group." She wrote and spoke about all these as well as the Bomb, Mozart, Mickey Mouse, the Pill, Lucretius, the Rolls Royce, vivisection and Chelsea football club. She became...