The Great Dictator

The perfectly outrageous biography of Queen of Romance Barbara Cartland

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

"Deliciously well written" — Nigella Lawson

"A comic gem of a biography" — Craig Brown

"Sweet writes with great wit and brio" — Observer

"Every page is a cliff-hanger" — The Spectator

"Fantastically enjoyable" — Literary Review

"Eye-popping" — The London Standard

"Outrageously entertaining" — The Bookseller

"Wry, affectionate and very readable" — Louis Theroux

"Jaw-dropping" — India Knight

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.

"I really think this book might become the sleeper hit of the Christmas rush." — Robert McCrum

"An excellent, compassionate biography of the wildly prolific romantic novelist." — The Guardian

"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

"Sweet's prose is peppered with dry wit and sharpened by an eye for telling detail." — The Telegraph

"This book is superb. A psychologically acute rendering of a publishing phenomenon." — Jenny Colgan