Matthew Sweet: A Life Of Barbara Cartland

Penniless virgins. Reckless dukes. Flappers. Airmen. Suf fragettes. 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.Writer and broadcasterMatthew Sweet has drawn on archives and firsthand accounts to reveal 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.Part satire, part biography, part social history, The Great Dictator reveals how a literary legend was made.
Talking to Clare Clark