Richard Burton's journal of a booze-soaked life

One Sunday night, in the winter of 1981-82, there was a celebration, at the Duke of York's Theatre in London, of the original radio production of Under Milk Wood. Various participants in that famous broadcast, including Richard Burton, the original narrator, were to read the play under the direction of its producer, Reggie Smith. The theatre was packed, with a largely Welsh audience.

Burton seemed to be enjoying himself, but it was not easy to hear him. He was glued to the book, seemingly in private communion with it. After the interval, the reading resumed and it became evident that Burton had liberally refreshed himself. Now he was not just inaudible but incoherent, with a tendency to slump. The reading lurched to its conclusion, after which the cast repaired to the Garrick Club for supper.

When the first course of soup arrived, Burton gracefully slid into the bowl, face first, at which point Elizabeth Taylor (who had made an unannounced appearance onstage at the beginning of the evening) briskly pulled his head up, wiped him clean and took him back to the Savoy Hotel.

The wonder was that Burton pulled himself together sufficiently during his remaining two years after this incident to act in a number of films, including his last, 1984, shot the year of the title. Except for occasional brief stints on the wagon, these diaries, at least the vastly longer part of them, from 1965 onwards, could well be titled - as Burton himself suggested, only half-humorously - "The Diary of a Dipsomaniac".

His consumption was on a heroic scale. In May 1975, for example, there were six consecutive one-word entries: "booze". On the seventh day, the entry read: "went into clinic late afternoon." It was the familiar alcoholic pattern: the moroseness, the destructiveness, the self-reproach - his "mad moods".

By the end of the diaries, neither he nor the reader is any nearer to understanding the origins of his addiction. ("I don't know why I drink so much. I'm not unhappy…")