He then attended the University of St Andrews, graduating MA, then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained the MLitt degree, both with first class honours.
"Wrapped in my mother's Glenurquart tartan travelling rug, eating custard creams and drinking Ribena through a straw, I settled, in a bored sort of way, to watch a double bill on the only channel not killing time with sports commentaries.
[10] Erotic Vagrancy, his massive joint biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, took him 13 years to complete, and was published to generally positive reviews in October 2023.
[11] In a talk to The Oldie Literary Lunch in January 2024, Lewis said he pitched the book to his publisher as "Roland Barthes meets The Wolf Man".
[20] In defense, Lewis told Stephen Moss: "What I was trying to do with all my biographies was find a form that would suit the subject matter...Anthony Burgess was a great charlatan, so the book is full of all these mock-scholarly footnotes.
[4] Journalist Tanya Gold credits Lewis with reinventing the biography as a form and genre, during a discussion about Erotic Vagrancy at the Jewish Literary Foundation in March 2024.
[24][25] Lewis is married – to Anna, an educational psychologist – with three sons, and lives in Hastings, with a holiday apartment in Bad Ischl, Austria.