'The book of the year' SUNDAY TIMES
'One of the very best biographies I have ever read' STEPHEN FRY
'A hot thunderstorm of a book' DAVID HARE
'I've never read anything like it!' RICHARD E GRANT
'Erotic Vagrancy gave me a week of pure joy' CRAIG BROWN
'Unputdownable' TONY PALMER
'A genius writer' LYNN BARBER
'ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE . . . ONE OF THE GREAT READING EXPERIENCES OF MY LIFE' MARINA HYDE
A TOP 25 BEST BOOK OF 2023 (INDEPENDENT)
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
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, vital and passionately articulated book, which is as extravagant and wayward as its two subjects, is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed, being brilliant, sexuality, the intermingling of a low and a highbrow existence, pride, insecurity, attraction and repulsion, and devilry.
We see Taylor the child actress exchanging dogs and horses for husbands. We see 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 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 Sixties, where the narrative of Taylor and Burton becomes a Pop Art story.
Then, inevitably, it all goes wrong, with alcoholism, violence, recrimination and divorce ( twice ) - with Burton, whom Lewis depicts as a Faustus figure, damned by fame, dead at fifty-eight.
Stephen Fry has said, '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 subjects fizz and froth. Magnificent, terrible, tragic, triumphant.'
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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. -- Hadley Freeman * 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. -- India Knight * Home * Lewis is a brilliant writer; his acute eye for rich and fascinating detail is on open and shameless display here. -- Colm Toibin * 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 -- Stephen Fry * 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) *
Roger Lewis has achieved considerable word-of-mouth success with Seasonal Suicide Notes. He has also written a biography of Anthony Burgess, and Sunday Times best-selling books on Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and the Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey.
