SOURCE: "An Explosive Embrace," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4380, January 13, 1987, p. 269.

In the following review, Byatt calls Baroque 'n' Roll "a celebration of life and thought."

The English perceive Brigid Brophy as a maverick. They do not know where to have her. She writes athwart our traditions of understatement and mild social comment. Her novels are witty and artificial, and irritate the tidy categorizer, since they resemble each other only in the intellectual sensuality of their construction. Her enthusiasms are also disparate, but have in common a tendency to combine precision of expression, a certain extravagance, and formal or logical rigour pushed as far as it will decently go. Shaw, Wilde, Mozart, Jane Austen, Purcell, Firbank, the vegetarian cause, the art of lawn tennis, the baroque in its multitude of forms. She is, of course, not an English humorist but a member of that Celtic school in which...