Erotic Vagrancy

Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

By: Roger Lewis

Narrated by: Justin Avoth

The comic genius of English writing takes on Hollywood, delusion, celebrity and last century's ultimate glamour couple: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were a Sixties supercharged couple in an era of supercharged couples. As a pairing they were fantasy figures, impossibly desirable. Liz supple and soft, in perfumes and furs - yet with something demonic and lethal about her. Dick, in turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looked as though lit by silver moonlight - poised to turn into a wolf.

Roger Lewis uses this glamorous and damaged pair as the starting point to tell the story of an age of excess: the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels and the yachts sailing in an azure sea; the magnificent bad taste and greed. It is about the clash of worlds: the filth and decay of South Wales and the grandeur and elegance of Old Hollywood; the fantasies we have about film stars and the fantasies the Burtons had about each other.

'Brilliantly funny . . . the book of the year' - Sunday Times

'By turns, funny, tragic, tender and vicious . . . a word-of-mouth sensation' - Guardian

(P) 2023 Quercus Editions Ltd©2023 Roger Lewis

Critic reviews

Thirteen years in the writing, Erotic Vagrancy doesn't only surpass every other biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton yet to appear, this rich and articulate book is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed and being brilliant.

It is one of the very best biographies I have ever read. One of the best books about fame, desire, Hollywood and mid-to-late twentieth-century culture ever written. Inside which, brilliant, hilarious and sensitive insights on all
manner of subject fizz and froth. Magnificent, terrible, tragic, triumphant. (Stephen Fry)

Lewis' prose, so electrifying, so funny, so sharp, so unsolemn, always going in unexpected directions, and with all those hilarious asides. Erotic Vagrancy gave me a week of pure joy

A hot thunderstorm of a book

Unputdownable (Tony Palmer)

Fascinating and hilarious . . . The joy is in the writing and the writing is joyful . . . The boldness of Lewis's writing is perfectly suited to the charisma of his subjects. (Hadley Freeman)

As extravagant and uncompromising as its badly behaved stars.

Lewis's magnum opus is a masterpiece in a genre of his own invention.

He is a genius writer . . . - brilliant, witty, exhilarating, and a fund of good stories.

A wonderful book . . . so deliciously written . . . Erotic Vagrancy is the biography of the year. Correction. It's the book of the year and then some

A dionysiac humdinger.

The 'battling Burtons' Liz Taylor and Richard Burton were the most glamorous celebrity couple ever. Passionately devoted to each other, the high life and - fatally - the bottle, this fascinating account of their love affair is gripping stuff.

Stupendous book

This eccentric, baroque and often funny book, full of riffs, asides and venom, is a study of megastardom, excess and monstrous personalities.

Tantalising

Excellent . . . Lewis has managed to create something bigger and more extravagant than a biography . . . Erotic Vagrancy manages to be both beautiful and ugly, romantic and putrid, which befits Burton and Taylor, their love, their style, their era which is long gone.

Glitters like one of Taylor's rubies

Bold, bitchy and bloody-minded. It is their masterpiece.

I started it on Friday and basically haven't done anything else but read it since, including over dinner last night. It is crazily good, hugely clever, monstrously opinionated, full of epic tangents, often mean (my God, so mean), completely gossipy, wildly, hilariously funny - like, put it down while you catch your breath funny - and brilliantly written. (India Knight)

Lewis is a brilliant writer; his acute eye for rich and fascinating detail is on open and shameless display here. (Colm Toibin)

Masterpiece

Read it now. This book is a universe of insight and scholarship written by an obsessive.

The human side!

The author did a great job making these extraordinary people human being. Great REED recommended!

This was great!

I picked this up because of Stephen Fry’s recommendation. Hugely entertaining and the reader was incredible.

Irreverent and entertaining.

A fascinating reflection on an era when stars were larger than life. Full of golden nuggets written and read with a Burtonian wry dry wit. I grew up in the 60s and 70s and remember the media following their affairs and movements, and my parents anecdotal interest and sympathies. Times have changed and the freedoms we have since lost to our perhaps more evolved, puritanical and judgmental society make the revelations more scandalous and juicy.

a very smart observation

....an almost literary fever dream take on the famous couple...rambling in the best way... stream of conscious at times....as if Kenneth Tynan, Martin Amis or Harold Pinter were pulling the strings. AND by far the greatest performance/reading of any book I have ever listened to on Audible. I assume there are awards for book reading performances and this one should win hands down. The narrator, Justin Avoth, even manages to very convincingly, and not cringingly, impersonate not only Burton but other celebrities. An incredible performance and narrating as good as any of Burton's.