Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Welsh critic and biographer Lewis (The Life and Death of Peter Sellers) acknowledges that much has already been written about the relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, so readers might believe there’s nothing new to reveal. Lewis argues, however, that no one has paid adequate attention to Burton and Taylor’s cinematic legacy, so that’s what he attempts to showcase in this lengthy biography. Thirteen years in the making, the book is well-researched, and Lewis clearly knows his subjects and their movies. But some readers may find this volume to be a strange combination of flowery intellectualizing, literary quotes (spanning Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Freud, and novelist/memoirist Edna O’Brien) interspersed with page-long paragraphs that sometimes read like fever dreams and plenty of Lewis’s gossipy personal opinions. For example, Lewis comments on Burton’s and Taylor’s sexual proclivities and calls Taylor a “filthy beast” when describing her personal habits. Including a more than 50-page prologue and plenty of British phrases, the book sometimes seems to be as much about Lewis as it is about Taylor and Burton.