Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the perfectly outrageous biography of Barbara Cartland, the Queen of Romance.
‘Deliciously well written’ – Nigella Lawson
‘Matthew Sweet, who seems born to write this biography, installs us in an open-topped two-seater, and puts his foot down on the gas like a boy racer, hurtling his readers through a no-man’s-land of shell shock and party going’. The Tablet
Barbara Cartland wrote 723 books and sold millions of copies of them without ever touching a typewriter: instead, she reclined on her sofa with a Pekinese on her lap – and romantic fiction billowed out of her.
This dazzling biography reveals the woman behind the powder and mascara – a clever, socially precarious writer navigating a twentieth-century world of war-damaged men, class conflict and sexual peril. Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator reveals how a literary legend was made.