HATCHET Jobs. That was the title of a 2004 collection of bad reviews by the American writer Dale Peck, a mean and nasty compilation that did its author little long-term favour.

I mention this to start because the last book I read by Roger Lewis was his brutal takedown of Anthony Burgess from 2003.

Its tone was harsh and unrelenting. There was a lot of cheap jibes about Burgess’s wig. You thought: Hang on! This is the guy who wrote Earthly Powers, A Clockwork Orange. You could forgive Burgess a lot – his cheesy cheroots, his repeated recipe for Lancashire hotpot, his endless borings on about Finnegans Wake.

So, what to make of Lewis’s new biography on Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Are we in for another chainsaw massacre? That would be a quick no.

There’s a hell of a lot more going on here. Lewis takes his title from a rebuke aimed at the couple by no less an authority than the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore della Domenica.

It warned Burton/Taylor: “You will finish in an erotic vagrancy without end or without a safe port.”

Why so?

That’s what Lewis examines after a prolonged period of musing on the couple and what they mean culturally.

Like Ian Penman’s book on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Lewis has got rid of “the obvious” in his rewriting.

This book is not a long tedious list of biographical facts – it attempts to snare the essence of the couple.

Lewis observes the “glare and noise” of Burton/Taylor armed with shades and ear protectors. He’s alert to the many ambiguities their marriage presented, the co-existence of its “inelegance and sparkling filigree”.

That love of theirs was, at various points, “something obsessive, psychotic, maimed, disturbed, haunted”.

We learn Liz was as serious a valetudinarian as you’d want to meet; she was always on the point of death.

A young hospital intern clerking Liz would baulk at her past medical history.

Her thrombosis, her tracheotomy, her falls, her back injuries, her piles. Transcribing these into the notes would be like rewriting The Oxford Textbook of Medicine. Liz, in Lewis’s words, “never had the humble shits, only severe amoebic dysentery”.

On the other hand, the movies gave us Liz as a figure in ecstasy, a Salome, an untamed shrew. Lewis talks of her “unique intensity, its sources other-worldly”.

She could be hysterical, slatternly, slovenly, violent, but her animal sexuality was as charged and vulgar as the Las Vegas Strip. Liz was about diamonds, fur coats, champagne; she was all jewels and embonpoint, Negronis in Portofino.

Watching her in Ivanhoe, Lewis asserts that Liz was “the last of the great silent movie actresses”. He adores the couple for “going too far”, creatures of appetite with an Iggy-like lust for life. Of course, they’d had it in the ear before.

AS for Burton, he knew his life “was both glamorous and a source of dissatisfaction and emptiness – magnificent and ridiculous”.

Born the 10th child of a Welsh miner, his childhood was challenging – his mum died when he was only two – but the breaks came.

Director Michael Powell thought Burton had a “pagan simplicity”, the actress Margaret Rutherford said he oozed charm.

And then there was that voice that Lewis brilliantly describes as “one of the 20th century’s great noises – roaring, swelling, delicate and bombastic by turns”.

Hear him in Where Eagles Dare (go on, watch it again this Christmas) as he paraphrases Gertrude Stein in one of the greatest bonkers moments in all cinema when he says, for no obvious reason I can fathom: “A hole is a hole is a hole”. And then goes on to slay half the Wehrmacht with our own doomed beauty Mary Ure at his side.

Burton was dead at 58, kippered, smoked. But the guy was a legend. Men of my generation still dream of blowing up Nazis like Burton did, jumping from cable car to cable car.

In conclusion, it’s worth noting Welshman Lewis completed a critical edition of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner. He has a deep understanding of Celtic ethical ambivalence over issues of good and evil.

I’ve barely scratched the substance of his remarkable book on these latter-day versions of Venus and Bacchus, Anthony and Cleopatra.

Burton/Taylor, those mythical Hollywood Babies.