A wickedly funny and perfectly horrifying portrait of the queen of romance, featuring high society, bad behaviour, violet creams and Baby Jane eyelashes.

Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suffragettes. Barbara Cartland made them fall in love. She wrote 723 books without 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.

After 49 proposals, she chose the wrong one. What followed was a life stranger than any of her novels.

From country house weekends to Fleet Street offices, from Mayfair bedrooms to the divorce court, Matthew Sweet traces Cartland's extraordinary journey through a century of upheaval. Here are terrorist plots, psychic seances, suppressed scandals, plagiarism battles in the cutthroat world of romance publishing - and a surprising turn as a campaigner for Romany rights.

Drawing on unprecedented access to Cartland's vast archives and firsthand accounts from those who knew her, Sweet delivers a wonderfully entertaining study of class, fame, scandal and self-aggrandisement. Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator reveals how a literary legend was made.

Details

ISBN13: 9781399715805
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 496
Edition:
Publication Date: 08 Sep 2026
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publication City, Country: United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 23.2(H)x15.4(L)x4.6(W)618
Weight (gm): 618

Author Biography

Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of the 6-part detective series, Bookish. He is the author of Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001), Shepperton Babylon (Faber, 2005), The West End Front (Faber, 2011) and Operation Chaos (Picador 2018). His novel, The New Forest Murders was published in 2025.

Matthew presents Free Thinking on BBC Radio 4 and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3. Additional broadcasting includes The Culture Show (BBC2), Checking into History (C4), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4).

He has been film critic of the Independent on Sunday, photography critic of Newsweek and fashion columnist for 1843/The Economist.

In 2017 he and the baker Frances Quinn achieved a chocolate-related Guinness World record that held good until 2022, when it was broken by Ant and Dec.

Matthew lives with his family in London.

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