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‘We are stuck like chicken feathers to tar’: Elizabeth Taylor’s description of the fabled romance

The Burton-Taylor relationship was either one of the greatest love stories of all time or a suicide pact carried out in relentless slow motion

21 October 2023

9:00 AM

21 October 2023

9:00 AM

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor Roger Lewis

Riverrrun, pp.750, 30

‘To begin at the beginning,’ intones Richard Burton with a voice like warm treacle at the start of the 1971 film Under Milk Wood. It’s hard to imagine an actor more obviously influenced by his own beginnings. The epigraph to this double biography is ‘The damp, dark prison of eternal love’, a line borrowed from Quentin Crisp.

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