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.