Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed

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Hellraisers is the story of four of the greatest boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set and into a pub: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed. If you come away from reading ‘Hellraisers’ thinking the Four Lushketeers are excellent role models, you, my friend, have a friggin’ problem. Turns out that the actor Michael York — he played D'Artagnan in that movie, though younger audiences might know him as Basil Exposition in the Austin Powers films — was one of the diners that morning, and he swears it happened just like that.

Also, less than a month ago, I saw a brief interview with the old Richard Harris in which the alcoholic said he didn’t regret even one drop of what he’d done in his life. Even if a quarter of the stuff covered in ‘Hellraisers’ is true, these guys sure weren’t candidates for sainthood. They got away with their destructive behaviour - smashing up restaurants and hotels was their forte - because of the adulation, amounting to a societal disease, that we accord to those we deem to be celebrities. The anecdotes pretty much follow one basic form: Person X got really drunk, did something stupid, doesn't remember it, doesn't regret it.The least likable is Oliver Reed, who was a violent chauvinist pig when drunk but a most generous man when sober. This highly entertaining biography of four charismatic and much loved actors follows them through five decades of boozing, brawling and braggadocio. It's slightly different for each man - with Richard Harris and Oliver Reed there is a fight of some kind, with Richard Burton there is also Elizabeth Taylor (who drank as much or more than he did), and with Peter O'Toole there is always a bon mot. View image in fullscreen Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton in the 1960 film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Blessed and cursed with personal charisma in spades, Georgiana was a patron and practitioner of the arts and sciences. The sprightly smash 'n dash of the prose so wonderfully captures the wanton belligerence of both bingeing and stardom you almost feel the guys themselves are telling the tales (and moaning and toasting all the while. The wealthy aristocrat des Esseintes was once, he tells us, a “jaded sophisticate”; “he had kept mistresses already famed for their depravity”. Told through the eyes of Martin, a wannabe hellraiser, we begin our tale in a typical London pub at Christmas time.Overall a very good quality service from this seller and I would not hesitate to recommend this seller. Sadly at the time of the writing, the only one still alive was Peter O'Toole (sadly also now passed), and after going on the adventure with them throughout the pages, I admit sadness at their premature ends detailed here. Hellraisers" wants only to be a rowdy collection of greatest hits, and it lives up to that fun-loving ambition.

Sellers’s other subjects, he perfected a cavalier panache that allowed him to glide through life delivering boozy bon mots, thus eclipsing certain unpleasant realities. Like the rejuvenating martinis and blurry haze of cigarettes in 'Mad Men, ' Robert Sellers's nostalgic Hellraisers .Oliver ReedThis is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub. Au contraire: “O’Toole, Burton and I all drank to excess not because we had problems, but because we loved it,” Harris said. His iconic work for the Prodigy on the Fat of The Land LP brought him to the attention of an international audience. Hellraisers: A savage sock in the jaw to polite, reverential biographical graphic novels, these hilariously bleak shock tales make the modern-day antics of Lindsay Lohan look like Dr. Robert Sellers is a former stand-up comedian and the author of biographies of Sting, Tom Cruise, two appreciations of the work of Sean Connery and the definitive book on The Pythons: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

But if you think you drink a lot compared to these cinematic icons, then it's a miracle that you haven't been in a coma since 1987. As with Dorian Gray, four years later, exactly what he gets up to in his mysterious adventures in Soho and the East End is, apart from violence, not detailed. Sellers skims over their respective childhoods as excuses for Burton’s, Harris’s, O’Toole’s, and Reed’s lifestyle choices.

In her case the showing off was spurred on by deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and a desperate need for approbation. Onscreen, they made British cinema sexy in classic films including Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver, Becket and This Sporting Life. Yes, I feel like I know a lot more about these men when I finished the book than I did when I started - was any of it anything I really needed to know?