Erotic Vagrancy

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.

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

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

Though he'd have you believe he was an aristocratic orphan left in the jungle and raised by monkeys, Roger Lewis was in fact born in industrial South Wales in the last century, educated in Scotland, and became a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, at the age of twenty-four. His book The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was made into the Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning film by HBO, starring Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron. Lewis, who in 2010 received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, divides his time between a collapsing Georgian property in the Herefordshire Balkans and a flat above a dirndl shop in the imperial spa town of Bad Ischl, near Salzburg in Austria. When in London he is reliably to be found in Rules, the charming old-world restaurant in Covent Garden.

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