Erotic Vagrancy

''One of the very best biographies I have ever read'' STEPHEN FRY
''A hot thunderstorm of a book'' DAVID HARE
''Erotic Vagrancy gave me a week of pure joy'' CRAIG BROWN
''Unputdownable'' TONY PALMER
''A genius writer'' LYNN BARBER
''I''ve never read anything like it!'' RICHARD E GRANT

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.