Erotic Vagrancy

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

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.
Belfast Telegraph
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
Craig Brown
A hot thunderstorm of a book
David Hare
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.
Sunday Times
As extravagant and uncompromising as its badly behaved stars.
Observer
Lewis's magnum opus is a masterpiece in a genre of his own invention.
The Times
He is a genius writer . . . - brilliant, witty, exhilarating, and a fund of good stories.
The Telegraph
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
Mail on Sunday
A dionysiac humdinger.
Spectator (Duncan Fallowell Book of the Year)
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.
New Statesman
Stupendous book
Scotsman
This eccentric, baroque and often funny book, full of riffs, asides and venom, is a study of megastardom, excess and monstrous personalities.
Robbie Millen, The Times
Tantalising
Sunday Independent
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.
Sight and Sound
Glitters like one of Taylor's rubies
Sunday Times
Bold, bitchy and bloody-minded. It is their masterpiece.
Sight and Sound
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.
Home
Lewis is a brilliant writer; his acute eye for rich and fascinating detail is on open and shameless display here.
Guardian
I've never read anything like it! Roger Lewis's analysis, theories, cross referencing, flights of fancy and encyclopaedic detail, are nirvana for this detail obsessed reader!
Richard E Grant
The best book on movie stardom full stop. A masterpiece of insight and imagination against which all future biographies of anyone and everyone shall be found wanting.
The Critic
Few biographies have been written with this level of intelligence and beauty..
The Film Stage
My book (and title) of the year. A magnificent, compendious and fantastically readable account of the phenomenon that was Taylor-Burton. It manages to be hilarious and at the same time deeply insightful and understanding. What emerges is a truthful and scintillating picture of the couple and their astonishing impact on each other and on the world around them. What makes the experience of reading Erotic Vagrancy so matchless is that Lewis writes, word on word, sentence on sentence, better than any biographer alive.
Stephen Fry
[Erotic Vagrancy is] huge and compendious but so stunningly well-written and filled with such eye-popping and extraordinary details, accompanied by such penetrating and hilarious asides ... well, I've taken longer to read some novellas
The Observer (Books of the Year 2024)
Within its 600 pages is everything you could conceivable want to know about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, including, but not limited to, Elizabeth's favourite sexual position, the only meal Richard Burton cooked during their marriage and the weekly rent of their dogs' yacht ... But bizarre trivia aside, Erotic Vagrancy gains its power from Roger Lewis's joyful writing
Sunday Times (Books of the Year 2024)
A gloriously gossipy portrait of Hollywood power couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton . . . read with just the right amount of archness by actor Justin Avoth
The Guardian (10 Best Audiobooks for Summer)
Riotously demented . . . ridiculously huge, ridiculously meticulous, ridiculously shocking: it's essentially all the goo of modernity effortlessly condensed into a slippery bottle of Malibu sunlotion. Madly clever but joyfully coco-nuts.
Nicola Barker (Stylist Best Beach Holiday Reads 2025)

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