Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Great Dictator: The Book Everyone (from Nigella Lawson to Louis Theroux) Can't Stop Talking About...

The Great Dictator: The Book Everyone (from Nigella Lawson to Louis Theroux) Can't Stop Talking About...

Sweet, Matthew

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary Figures

Publisher Price: $28.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 5, 2027

ISBN10: 1399715798
ISBN13: 9781399715799
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: Jan 5 2027
Pages: 496
Language: English
'Matthew Sweet has given the life-story of this icon of chiffon-and-pearls the telling it deserves - wry, affectionate, and very readable.' Louis Theroux
'The most genius, compelling, jaw-dropping, access-all-areas biography of Barbara Cartland.' India Knight
'This book is superb. A psychologically acute rendering of a publishing phenomenon.' Jenny Colgan

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.

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