EROTIC VAGRANCY

'Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor' and 13 years in the writing, this biography surpasses every other one and is in the words of David Hare 'A hot thunderstorm of a book.' The most glamorous celebrity couple ever, passionately devoted to each other, the high life and fatally the bottle, here is a fascinating account of their love affair in an eccentric, baroque and often funny book full of asides and venom. It is a study of excess and monstrous personalities and something much bigger and more extravagant than a biography. It is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed, being brilliant, sexuality and the intermingling of a low and a highbrow existence, pride, insecurity, attraction and repulsion, and devilry. We see Elizabeth Taylor the child actress exchanging dogs and horses for husbands. We see Richard Burton emerging from the mists and brimstone of Wales to be the greatest theatrical animal of his generation. The pair come together in Rome during the making of Cleopatra, which gives Roger Lewis the opportunity for a major farcical set-piece. We then enter a world of jewels and private jets, vodka, yachts and furs - the splendid vulgarity of the 60s. Then inevitably it all goes wrong, with alcoholism, violence, recrimination and divorce (twice), with Burton dead at the age of 58. This beautiful couple grew to have 'greater reality for me than reality' as Joyce once said. 645 magnificent pages.