[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, as she points out, Shaw and Wilde were briefly (and uneasily) linked. She is an Irish wit, and also a remorseless moralist.

Baroque 'n' Roll gathers up various essays: offering new insights into Edwin Drood and As You Like It, praising Freud and Navratilova, making us appallingly sensible of the pain we cause to our fellow-creatures, fish. The title essay, last in the book, is a six-part demonstration or definition (like Marvell's Definition of Love) of what she means by baroque. The essay itself is an example of the formal movements it attempts to define. It opens with the assertion that "form is constant throughout the arts" and examines the order and irregularities of poetry (Marvell, metaphysical verse, Milton), sculpture (Bernini), painting (a marvellous disquisition on Titian's Actaeon paintings and their possible influence on Shakespeare), music (Purcell and Dryden) and architecture. "A structure can be transposed from one art into another", Brophy says, and argues that Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress" resembles an Aristotelian syllogism, that English explores relationships through metaphor and Greek through the modulations of its very syntax. (Tennis, too, is a baroque form: it has its geometry, its orderly sequence of rules and scores, its asymmetrical, dissimilar, extravagant gestures. John McEnroe is, "if not an angel at least a baroque putto".)

Perhaps the centre of this complex construction is the Bernini sculpture of Saint Teresa, ecstatically and ambivalently pierced by the angel. "Baroque", Brophy tells us, "is an open, sometimes an explosive embrace of contradictions and oppositions, intellectual and of feeling". She goes on:

In sculpture, as often in architecture, the quintessential substance of the baroque is marble, a material likely, like some types of cheese, to be veined by a countercolour. When it is pure white, it can, at the working of a master, simulate the various softnesses of hair, lace and flesh, and yet it remains hard and cold. A natural rendering of the baroque ambivalence, it renders flesh at once more desirable and in the clutch of rigor mortis.

Which brings us to Brophy's account of the invasion of her own life by the progressive disabling of multiple sclerosis. These autobiographical pages have a matter-of-fact authority and a kind of nakedness not found elsewhere in the book. They are also wholly gripping as narrative: her situation is terrible, and yet she makes us curious about the detail of her experience, the nature of the insensitivity of doctors, and of the unnatural numbness in her legs, which "does not preclude pain or even the further numbness of cold but makes one inhabit a surrealist world". The illness is susceptible to her baroque vision; she considers its metaphorical relation to an earlier experience of emotional violence, and notices its elements of absurdity—arresting us with the vision, imagined through other eyes, of "that eccentric Lady Levey, crawling across the hall". She has the right, in her position, to tell us that no other creature should suffer in the process of finding a cure. "It is not my personal stake that makes my anti-vivisectionist argument correct", she points out, but claims "the authority of a person with a personal stake in the matter."

All writers in this country are in debt to Brigid Brophy for her pertinacity, pugnacity and vision in the battle for Public Lending Right. There is nobody like her, no one who sees the world quite in her original way. Baroque 'n' Roll is, despite the fearful events of the "case-historical fragment", a celebration of life and thought.