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THE PERFECTLY OUTRAGEOUS BIOGRAPHY OF QUEEN OF ROMANCE BARBARA CARTLAND
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
'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
'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
Matthew Sweet is co-writer, with Mark Gatiss, of the TV 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. His 25 years of broadcasting include 12 years of Sound of Cinema (Radio 3), five series of The Philosophers Arms (Radio 4) and 1922: The Birth of Now, a ten-part history of modernism (Radio 4). He is a Public Humanities Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
