Culture

For the Love of Lit and Liz

The Richard Burton Diaries BY Richard Burton. edited by Chris Williams. Yale University Press. Hardcover, 704 pages. $35.
The cover of The Richard Burton Diaries

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the years he most assiduously kept a diary, the actor Richard Burton (1925-84) had the following pet names for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor: Lumpy, Booby, Old Fatty, Shumdit, Cantank, Old Snapshot and the Baby. She sometimes called him, who knows why, Darling Nose and Drife.