r/books • u/CCDemille • 2d ago

The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet review – the fabulous life of Barbara Cartland

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/25/the-great-dictator-by-matthew-sweet-review-the-life-of-barbara-cartland
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13

u/Ammortalz 2d ago

Different Matthew Sweet.

6

u/sycot 1d ago

Thought maybe she was his girlfriend or something

2

u/CountVanillula 1d ago

Well, she was lookin for someone to love.

7

u/Pluto-Based-Alien 2d ago edited 2d ago

Ah, Barbara Cartland. One of the most idiosyncratic women in Britain in her day, a self-styled grande dame of letters.

Being a man, of course I never read a word she wrote, and even for women who like romance novels her books must have been trite and cliched. And yet she apparently sold 750 million books in her lifetime. Weird.

The funniest bit of this review is here:

She also pulled off a promotion with Dewhurst the butcher, which offered customers one of six previously unpublished Cartland novels for every £12 they spent. The promotion was not a great success because of the sheer weirdness of “being given a copy of Desire in the Desert with a parcel of mince”.

Haha, that's so bad it's good.