'A Private Life' offers a rich and illuminating reassessment, invigorating the somewhat lackluster discourse about the iconic movie star. Although there are at least 10 biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Cashmore's lively study provides a compelling interpretation and bridges the many gaps between Taylor's impact on the American zeitgeist and her alluring, infamous life.

Nathan Smith, The Washington Post

[Cashmore] examines Taylor with all the thoroughness of a jeweller with a loupe, holding every facet of her public persona to the light. He shows how she was the herald of the curious intimacies that now exist between audience and celebrity, a one-woman rolling news channel long before social media.

The Sunday Times

In the cigar-chomping Hollywood of the Fifties ... how did Taylor manage to call the shots? Ellis Cashmore's book is an impressive answer ... [His] thesis ... [on the effects of Taylor's unfailing ability to merge art and life is what] makes his book compelling.

The Daily Telegraph

Ellis Cashmore details the way in which Taylor 'consciously made herself into a living narrative', allowing the dramas of her life to supersede, refract and monetize the dramas she enacted on screen ... [A] book which catalogues what seems like not just every detail of her career, but also every detail of the lives of her supporting cast.

Times Literary Supplement

Cashmore (Beyond Black: Celebrity and Race in Obama's America) combines broad research and personal observations in this lively study examining how Elizabeth Taylor transformed our perception of modern celebrity.

Publishers Weekly

[Taylor's] extraordinary life and career ... is pored over and unpicked in painstaking detail ... [Cashmore's] efforts in tackling the Taylor brand are prodigious.

Sight & Sound